Yaxin Zhang is a third year Ph.D student in the Grove School of Engineering at the City College of New York.  Her specialization is transportation.  Prior to coming to CCNY, Yaxin began her undergraduate program at Taiyuan Industrial College in China where she studied polymer materials and engineering and then received a master’s degree in logistics and operations management from Cardiff University in the UK.

While studying at Cardiff University, Yaxin began to see “connections” that influence transportation performance such as the relationship between growth of e-commerce and traffic congestion. She also realized that awareness of “environmental, social and behavioral science issues are required in order to plan and manage transportation operations.”

The understanding of the multiple, connecting issues together with an “interest in making things work more efficiently” led Yaxin to her current studies at the Grove School.  Here she has been able to apply a variety of research methods, survey techniques, and analytical approaches. Her research area was mainly focus on e-commerce, city logistics and parking activity in New York City.

Yaxin’s September 11^th  internship is Analyzing and Monitoring Congestion and Transportation Performance Measures Using Big Data. In this role, she will assist NYMTC staff by using real-time probe data to produce more accurate analyses of congestion in the NYMTC planning area.  The project will focus on the use of The National Performance Management Research Data Set (NPMRDS), which is used in the computation of performance measures for both Transportation Performance Management (TPM) and the Congestion Management Process (CMP).