zegras

STUDENTS

I work closely with undergraduate and graduate students, often involving them in sponsored research projects (see behavioral, planning, implementation, and digital mobility research project pages). Undergraduates have worked on my research through the MIT Summer Research Program (MSRP) or as a UROP or a SMURF). Graduate students have worked on sponsored research projects in Boston, Chicago, Chile, China, Lisbon, Mexico, Singapore, and beyond. These students typically turn this research into their theses and publishable work, often award-winning.  My student advisees have had internships with a number of international organizations, such as the World Bank, EMBARQ (the WRI Center for Sustainable Transport) and the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP), and numerous government agencies and consulting firms in offices in Cambridge to Chile, Mexico, India, and China.

If you are a current MIT student, and interested in working with me as an Advisor for your thesis or dissertation, please arrange a time to meet during my office hours and/or otherwise bend my ear when we bump into each other.  Students working on their theses with me, please take the time to review and adhere to my personal “thesis guidelines” to ensure a smooth and fun process.

If you are a prospective MIT student (MCP, MST or PhD), all applications are evaluated competitively and we select students thusly. All programs are always looking for bright minds. Applicants for any of the degree programs are equally evaluated through a competitive, annual application process. Visit the DUSP web-site for more information and come to the Open House for interested students, if you can – typically held in mid-November. If you are interested in the PhD program, beyond doing well in graduate classes and on the GRE tests, getting strong letters of recommendation and showing you have relevant research and work experience, you should write a statement that shows you can clearly articulate an important and interesting and feasible research question(s), maps a plan to answer that question(s), and explains why MIT is the right place for you. You might also consider the Interdepartmental Transportation PhD at MIT, the PhD opportunities of the MIT Portugal Program, and the PhD opportunities in Singapore (NUS, SUTD), through which fellowships are offered via SMART.

If you are an applicant interested in working with me, please know that: (1) you must apply through the normal application process (see previous paragraph); (2) you can review my most up-to-date (though possibly still dated…) research portfolio here; (3) I am always looking to support good students who are accepted through (1) and reasonably match (2); (4) the likelihood of me responding to your email inquiries increases with your attention to (1)-(3).

Theses Supervised
(some are linked, others you can download by searching theses at MIT’s d-space)

Behavorial Interactions

Miller, Ruth. Dynamic Minds in Rapid Urbanization: How External Experience Affects Opinions on Public Transportation in a Historically Rural Area, 2007 (Winner: Best DUSP Undergrad Thesis).

Hebbert, Francis, MCP. Local Travel Habits of Baby Boomers in Suburban Age-restricted Communities, 2008.

Zhang, Jiyang, MCP. Operational energy consumption and GHG emissions in residential sector in urban China: an empirical study in Jinan, 2010.

Jiang, Yang, MCP/MST. Does energy follow urban form? an examination of neighborhoods and transport energy use in Jinan, China, 2010.

Wang, Dong, MCP. Household Operational Energy Consumption in Urban China: A Multilevel Analysis on Jinan, 2012.

Chen, Y. PhD (DUSP). Neighborhood Design and the Energy Efficiency of Urban Lifestyle in China: Treating Residence and Mobility as Lifestyle Bundle, 2012.

Yu, Feifei, MST. Simulation of Household In-home and Transportation Energy Use: An Integrated Behavioral Model for Estimating Energy Consumption at the Neighborhood Scale, 2013.

Hannan, Veronica, MCP/MST. Capturing the Impacts of Land Use on Travel Behavior: A Comparison of Modeling Approaches, 2013.

Chheda, Rinal, MST. Negotiating the Neighborhood: Modeling the Relationship Between Built Environment and Transit Choice, 2014.

Li, Weixuan, MCP/MST. Modeling Household Residential Choice Using Multiple Imputation, 2014.

Xiang, Yunke, MCP/MST. Dynamics of Vehicle Ownership in Singapore, 2014.

Han, Yafei, MCP/MST. Temporal transferability assessments of vehicle ownership models and trip generation models for Boston Metropolitan Area, 2015.

Posada, Pablo, MCP. Location, location, location choice models, 2015.

Strategic Planning

Warade, Ritesh, MCP/MST. The Accessibility and Development Impacts of New Transit Infrastructure: The Circle Line in Chicago, 2007 (Winner: Ralph Adams Cram Award).

Burgess, Jess, MCP. A Comparative Analysis of the Park-and-Ride/Transit-Oriented Development Tradeoff, 2008.

Teich, Tegin, MCP/MST. Social Change and Cycling as a Form of Sustainable Transportation: The behavior-policy interaction in a medium-sized developing city, 2008.

Ghauche, Anwar, MST. Integrated transportation and energy activity-based model, 2010.

Austin, Andrew, MCP. The taxicab as public transportation in Boston, 2011.

Cruzat, Raimundo, SM. How the Institutional Organization of Santiago affects its Capacity to Design and Apply Urban Energy Initiatives, 2013.

Stewart, Anson, MCP/MST. Visualizing Urban Accessibility Metrics for Incremental Bus Rapid Transit Projects, 2014.

Tay, Hengky, SM. Cycling Infrastructure as a First Mile Solution for Mass Transit Access in Singapore – a Study of MRT Ridership in Singapore Towns, 2012.

Chen, Szu-han, MST. The Relationship between Rail Transit Ridership and Built Environment and Transportation System, 2013.

Dowd, Michael, MCP/MST. Modeling inundation impacts on transportation network performance: a GIS and four-step transportation modeling analysis, 2015.

Fernandez Reyes, Santiago, MCP. Station-level ridership on Mexico City’s subway and BRT, 2016.

Xie, Yiling, MCP. Measuring The Performance of Metro-Based Transit Oriented Development (TOD): A Comparative Study between Beijing and Singapore, 2017.

Policy, Finance, Implementation

Antos, Justin, MCP. Paying for Public Transportation: The Optimal, the Actual, and the Possible, 2007 (Winner: Best DUSP MCP Thesis).

Judy, Meredith, MCP. The Potential for Bus Rapid Transit to Promote Transit Oriented Development: An Analysis of BRTOD in Ottawa, Brisbane, and Pittsburgh, 2007.

Napolitan, Francesca, MCP. Shifting Urban Priorities: The Removal of Inner City Freeways in the United States, 2007.

Kintala, Kumar, MCP/MST. Leveraging Bus Rapid Transit Lite for Transit Corridor Development: Springfield Avenue and Bloomfield Avenue in Newark NJ, 2008.

Nelson, Joshua, MCP/MST. Stuck With the Bill, But Why?  An Analysis of the Portuguese Public Finance System with Respect to Surface Transportation Policy and Investments, 2008.

Rayle, Lisa, MCP/MST. Telling the future together: the potential of collaborative scenario-building in the transformation of urban governance in Portugal, 2010.

Lee, Eugene, SM. Promoting sustainable transportation through the integration of cycling with public transit: lessons from Copenhagen and Munich for Singapore, 2010.

Rizos, Anthony, SB/MCP. Implementation of advanced transit traveler information systems in the United States and Canada: practice and prospects, 2010.

Zhang, Jiyang, MCP. Operational energy consumption and GHG emissions in residential sector in urban China: an empirical study in Jinan, 2010.

Jiang, Yang, MCP/MST. Does energy follow urban form? an examination of neighborhoods and transport energy use in Jinan, China, 2010.

Grillo, Christopher, MCP/MST. Sustainable metropolitan mobility and public-private partnerships: A Highway to Institutional Reform? 2011.

Jacobi, Amy, MCP. Fiscal Federalism and its Potential Effects on Public Transportation in Mid-Sized Cities, 2012.

Osborne, James, MCP. Indicators that Matter: Measuring Transportation Performance in Ahmedabad, 2012.

Shih, Janet, MCP. Waiting for TOD: developing in the Millbrae BART Station Area, 2012.

Sajjad, Fizzah, MCP. Mega-Project Politics: The Evolution of Lahore’s First BRT Corridor, 2014.

Rennert, Lindiwe-Claudia, MCP. Where desperation planning meets reparations planning : transit as an agent of equity in the shaping of Detroit’s future, 2016.

Digitalization

Ching, Albert, MCP. A User-Flocksourced Bus Intelligence System for Dhaka, 2012.

Humeres, Francisco, MCP. Assessing Models of Urban Structure with Non-Conventional Data Sources: Using Social Media to test the Splintering Urbanism Theory in Santiago de Chile, 2013.

Holub, Amalia, MCP. Street-Level Air Quality: Exploring the Feasibility of a Cyclist-Led, Crowdsourced Map in Singapore and Mexico, 2014.

Butts, Kuan, MCP. Design and Deploy:Iterative Methods in Adapting Mobile Technologies for Data Acquisition, A Case Study in St. Louis, Missouri, 2014.

Eros, Emily, MCP. Transportation Data as Disruptive Innovation in Mexico City, 2014.

Cheng, Phil Tinn, MCP. Toward a multi-scale participatory urban policymaking platform : co-designing Mass Transit using LEGO bricks, open data, and interactive pixels, 2016.

Li, Corinna, MCP/MST. Better, quicker, together: enabling public transport service quality co-monitoring through a smartphone-based platform, 2016.

Li, Menghan. MCP/MST. Measuring travel equity and representativeness : opportunities and challenges of using smartphone-based travel survey in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, 2016.

Navas Duk, Cristián, SM. Testing collaborative accessibility-based engagement tools: Santiago de Chile Case, 2017.

Stewart, Anson Forest. PhD (Trans). Advancing accessibility: public transport and urban space, 2017.