News & Events

Civil engineering Ph.D. student Wenjian Jia won the Best Paper Award at the 2019 American Society of Civil Engineers International Conference on Transportation & Development for his paper, “Evaluating Fuel Tax Revenue Impacts of Electric Vehicle Adoption in Virginia Counties: Applications of a Bivariate Linear Mixed Count Model.” Wenjian also won the Younger Member 3-Minute Pitch contest at the conference, pitching new research at UVA on the energy and emissions impacts of autonomous electric vehicles. The paper was recently published in Transportation Research Record.

Tyler Cody, a Ph.D. student in systems engineering, won the Best Student Paper award at IEEE SysCon 2019, the flagship conference of the IEEE Systems Council.

Congratulations to Engineering Systems and Environment students Matthew Dean, Bethany Gordon and Erica Loudermilk for being named NSF Graduate Research Fellows. The National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported science, technology, engineering and mathematics disciplines who are pursuing research-based master's and doctoral degrees at accredited United States institutions.

Graduate Students from Engineering Systems and Environment and the Convergent Behavioral Science Initiative (CBSI) lab presented their research at Engineering Sustainability 2019 in Pittsburgh this week. Student attendees include Allen Townsend, Patrick Hancock, Catherine Owsik, Bethany Gordon, Leon Yacubian, Kaetlyn Stenger, Shraddha Praharaj, Michaela Barnett and Wenjian Jia.

Eno Transportation Weekly featured a “Women Takeover“ edition for Women's History Month. In it, Donna Chen, an assistant professor UVA's Department of Engineering Systems and Environment, writes about strategies to speed up electric vehicle adoption in the U.S. Both federal and state tax incentives positively impact preference for electric vehicles, and the provision of public fast-charging infrastructure is especially key for increasing adoption of battery electric vehicles.

Madhur Behl, an assistant professor in computer science and engineering systems and environment, and his Ph.D. student Varundev Sukhil gave a talk and tutorial on F1/10 Autonomous Racing at the 2019 Nvidia GTC Conference, held in San Jose, Calif. They were invited by the Nvidia Deep Learning Institute for an instructor-led tutorial, which was attended by more than 150 participants. Nvidia GTC has become the premier artificial intelligence and deep learning conference series featuring multiple autonomous vehicles technologies, which are premiered at the venue every year.

Civil engineering assistant professor Donna Chen and Ph.D. students Wenjian Jia and Erin Robartes exhibited research about electric vehicle adoption and shared autonomous electric vehicle operations at Mobility Talks International on April 3 in Washington, DC. Professor Chen participated in a panel on preparing cities for the arrival of autonomous vehicles.

Civil engineering Ph.D. student Courtney Hill has been awarded the Ford Foundation Dissertation Completion Fellowship. The fellowship is a nationally competitive award that seeks to increase the diversity of the nation's college and university faculties by increasing their ethnic and racial diversity, maximize the educational benefits of diversity, and increase the number of professors who can and will use diversity as a resource for enriching the education of all students.

Civil engineering Ph.D. student Erin Robartes has been awarded the Women's Transportation Seminar Central Virginia Section Diane Woodend Jones Leadership Legacy Scholarship. The scholarships are awarded to women pursuing graduate studies working toward careers in transportation or related fields, and who demonstrate a specific interest in advancing transportation innovation.

Systems engineering professors Peter Beling and Barry Horowitz will present at the Systems Engineering Research Center colloquium, Enabler for System Security and AI-based Solutions, at Georgetown University in April. Horowitz is a co-leader of the two-day workshop. Beling will lead a session on Security Engineering.