2012 Student of the Year: Charlotte Frei
Thesis Title: Travel, Communication and Activity Behavior: Improving the User Experience in Transportation
Advisor: Hani Mahmassani
Charlotte Frei is a 4th year PhD student in Civil and Environmental Engineering at Northwestern University, studying Transportation Systems Analysis & Planning under the direction of Professor Hani Mahmassani. Charlotte earned a B.S. in Civil Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research projects focus on public transportation demand and travel behavior. The goal of her thesis work is to model customer satisfaction in order to explicitly account for transit user behavior in design of public transit operating schemes. Charlotte is active in the Chicago chapter of the Women's Transportation Seminar, where she is currently developing partnerships and resources to enhance knowledge of transportation related careers among high school girls. She is also the co-chair of the Society of Women Engineers graduate student committee, organizing programs to engage female graduate students.
Charlotte was selected for this award for her contributions to a research project conducted with and for the Chicago Transit Authority where she provided detailed spatial and temporal analysis of transit ridership for use in an optimization model to allocate the CTA’s bus fleet.
