Four students have recently been selected to be 2012-13 participants in the NYMTC/UTRC September 11th Memorial Program Academic Initiative, a program which began in 2005 to honor three NYMTC staff members who died in the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001: Ignatious Adanga, Charles Lesperance and See Wong Shum. These students include Adam Davidson from the College of Staten Island (CSI), Stanislav Parfenov of Polytechnic Institute of New York University (Polytechnic/NYU), Jeremy Safran of NYU, and Simin You of the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY).

Adam Davidson, a Ph.D. candidate at CSI in Earth and Environmental Sciences, will perform his internship at the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council under the direction of NYMTC Sustainability Manager Larry McAuliffe. Adam’s topic will be Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Emission Reduction Implementation Planning , which will involve development of selected regional transportation strategies for reducing GHG emissions, including evaluation of potential strategies for implementation by NYMTC member agencies and development of white papers that discuss the relative merits of the strategies, including amount of potential reduction, practical steps to implement the strategy, the cost of the strategy, and inclusion of case study information.

Stanislav Parfenov, a master’s of science candidate in civil engineering at Polytechnic/NYU, will work in the New York City Department of Transportation (NYCDOT) Division of Traffic and Planning. His NYCDOT supervisor is Mike Marsico. The work will focus on effects of street closures on New York City’s street network through the development of dynamic and static simulation models, which will be based on datasets of newly created NYCDOT’s Traffic Information Management System supplemented by taxi GPS data from the NYC Traffic and Limousine Commission.

Jeremy Safran, a master’s of urban planning candidate at NYU will also intern at NYCDOT with the Transit Development Group within the Division of Traffic and Planning. His internship will assess bus lanes in New York City, including the assembly of data on a wide variety of bus lane features such as signage, design, color, regulation, and enforcement and on bus performance. The research will result in a best practices document that describes and interprets the findings. The goal of this effort is to assist DOT in implementing bus lane infrastructure that maximizes performance for both Select Bus Service and regular transit buses. Jeremy’s supervisor at NYCDOT is Eric Beaton.

Simin You, a Ph.D candidate in computer science at the Graduate Center, CUNY will be interning with the NYCDOT Office of Research, Implementation, and Safety under the direction of Matthew Roe. Simin’s internship will focus on developing data management and analysis tools and consists of two major components: improving the existing Safety Data Viewer, and providing other management and analysis tools for transportation research and planning needs. Simin will also work closely with transportation professionals and get in touch with real world transportation data management and analysis problems. By applying state-of-the-art GIS and database management techniques, the research should result in efficient solutions to transportation problems, helping support the core missions of NYCDOT.