Laynie Weaver earned a bachelor’s degree in geography from Texas A&M. Her interest in transportation started while using the bike lanes on campus. She came to the New York area to study transportation in the community, particularly transit, bicycling, and walking. Laynie is working on her Master’s degree in Urban Planning specializing in transportation planning while also working at the Voorhees Transportation Center at Rutgers University. She expects to finish her degree in Spring 2005.

Neha Mittal is a doctoral student in Transportation Engineering at Rutgers. Mittal holds a BA in Engineering from Gujarat University, India and BA in Transportation Engineering from Rutgers.

Li Chen is a Transportation Program doctoral student in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the University Transportation Research Center Region II, City College of New York. She holds a B.S. in Transportation Management and a M.S. in Computer Science from Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics in China. She also holds a M.S. in Transportation Engineering from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Alabama.

Chan Ju (Jeannie) Kwon is the 2007 recipient of the UTRC’s WTS Student Award of $1000, which goes to the winner of the Women’s Transportation Seminar’s (WTS) Leonard Braun Memorial Graduate Scholarship. Jeannie is working on a Master’s degree in Public Administration at Wagner School of Public Service of New York University. She was an assistant to Elliot Sander at DMJM Harris and has followed him to the MTA, where she is a Special Assistant to the Executive Director.

Haiyun Lin is currently a student at the Department of Civil Engineering at City University of New York, where she has enrolled in the Ph.D. program in Transportation Engineering with a concentration in transportation planning.

Besides her studies, Haiyun is currently a research assistant at Region II University Transportation Research Center. Her work there mainly includes technology testing for MPO’s regional travel survey, as well as design and implementation of residential relocation survey in New York Metropolitan Region.

Nayibe Perez is studying for a Master’s in Civil Engineering specializing in Transportation at The City College of New York. After graduating with a Bachelor’s in Computer Engineering, she started working as a document control clerk at DMJM Harris. She is now the Project Control Engineer for the Tappan Zee Bridge Project at AECOM. She plans on focusing her career on helping to develop transit projects in order to increase their efficiency and sustainability. Her background in computers has also sparked her curiosity about how intelligent transportation systems can improve transit.

Tra Vua is working on her Ph.D. in Transportation Planning and Engineering at Polytechnic Institute of New York University. She is working under Professors Roess and Prassas on the Dynamic Rate Structure of Mileage-based User Charge (or the Vehicle Miles Traveled Tax). She became interested in this topic after a trip back to Vietnam in 2008, where she found that the increase in vehicles since her last time there seven years earlier had grown “at a dizzying pace” and the fumes, noise, congestion, and accidents levels were out of control.