City and Regional Planning PhD student Yujin Park has been announced as a recipient of the Helene M. Overly Memorial Scholarship through the Columbus Chapter of Women's Transportation Seminar (WTS). The scholarship was established in 1981 by WTS International to encourage and support women pursuing graduate studies in transportation or a related field. Park’s application will now be forwarded for consideration for the national-level scholarship of $10,000.

Park’s interest in transportation began during her graduate research at Seoul National University, South Korea, where she studied the intersection of urban planning and multimodal transportation systems. During her master’s study, she was involved in research on Electric Vehicle Sharing (EVS) programs.

As a PhD candidate in the City and Regional Planning program at Ohio State, Park has worked on various research projects on urban bicycling and carpool systems. In a two-year project funded by the NEXTRANS Center of US Department of Transportation, she studied two key parts of bicycling behavior: bicycle choice at the individual and neighborhood levels, and travel efficiency of bicycle trips at the route level.

Park has also worked on carpooling behavior analysis. She focused on user’s role preference (driver vs. passenger) and sociodemographics as important factors that shape the willingness to carpool and perceived incentives. The research, co-authored by Park, will be published in Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board.

Her current research questions are centered on the impact of the sharing economy and disruptive transportation technologies on multimodal transportation systems, especially the synergetic use of technologies to overcome conventional weaknesses of bicycling and carpooling.

“I am honored to receive this recognition. The scholarship will allow me to attend transportation and big data related conferences, as well as workshops that require travel,” commented Park. “It will also offer me a financial foundation to conduct a dissertation study on an adaptive form of multimodal transportation system.”

The WTS Columbus annual award ceremony will be held in Columbus on February 5, 2018.