Contributing to the Good of Travel Analysis

Celebrating the 2020 Zephie Award Winners

While the 2020 TRB Annual Meeting is well behind us in both time and thoughts, I wanted to use this time when we would normally be gearing up to see each other at Summer industry conferences to reflect on and celebrate the contributions of individuals and teams towards the public good. Especially since the “public good” seems more important than ever in this COVID-19 world.

When we originally developed the Zephyr Foundation Awards Program (AKA “Zephies”) in 2018 we did it to work towards our workforce development goals to Recruit, Educate, Collaborate, and Keep individuals to/in the field of travel analysis. However recognizing these individuals/teams at an event for industry insiders (i.e. the Zephyr Reception at the Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting) is not enough! While patting our frequent collaborators on the back is a worthy exercise, it doesn’t achieve our complete goal unless we share the success of these people and teams with industry onlookers and outsiders. So please — share away!

This years’s Zephie winners are:

• Decision-making hero: Sarah Sun of FHWA
• Exceptional Technical Achievement: the Sacramento Area Council of Governments (SACOG) Technical Team
• Impactful Research: Michel Bierlaire, EPFL
• Outstanding Industry Contributor: Michael Mahut, INRO Software
• Leadership: Joan Walker, University of California Berkeley

We are creating and linking individual posts to honor them and highlight each of their contributions which we will link to from here.