APDesign students earn Eisenhower Transportation Graduate Fellowship
MANHATTAN — Two graduate students from the College of Architecture, Planning & Design, or APDesign, are Kansas State University's latest recipients of the prestigious Dwight David Eisenhower Transportation Graduate Fellowship from the U.S. Department of Transportation.
Jason Groothuis, Omaha, Nebraska, and Tyler Tripp, Frisco, Texas, both master's students in regional & community planning, received the fellowship, which supports graduate studies in transportation-related disciplines. Their selection marks the fifth year in a row that APDesign students have earned the fellowship and the fourth year in a row that multiple APDesign students have received this financial support.
Greg Newmark, assistant professor of landscape architecture and regional & community planning, is the major professor to the fellowship-winning students.
The fellowships are awarded annually to 150-200 exceptional students around the country. The fellowship program advances the transportation workforce by attracting the brightest minds to the field through education, research and workforce development. The $5,000 awards to both Groothuis and Tripp include a stipend, tuition support and the opportunity to attend the 2021 Transportation Research Board annual meeting in Washington, D.C.
"We are grateful for the U.S. Department of Transportation's consistent support of regional & community planning students," said Stephanie Rolley, professor and head of the landscape architecture and regional & community planning department. "Our Eisenhower fellows have conducted research that informs a broad range of transportation issues, including social equity, alternative transportation systems and mass transit. Tyler and Jason will make strong contributions to that body of knowledge."
Groothuis received the fellowship for his project "Transit Systems: Omaha, Nebraska, ORBIT Equity and Benefit Analysis."
"As my ongoing master's report, I am working to analyze the effects of a new BRT — Bus Rapid Transit — line in Omaha," Groothuis said. "The report will specifically focus on analyzing if the locations of new stops are equitable in their placement to serve inner-city residents along the new BRT route. Most of the analysis done for the study is through GIS, using the transit data to plot the location of new stops and using multiple analysis features to determine their distance from likely points of trip generation."
Tripp received the fellowship for his project "The Effects of Affordable Alternative Transportation on the Upward Mobility of Low-Income Populations."
"I plan on using this opportunity to study the effects of affordable alternative transportation on upward mobility for disadvantaged communities," Tripp said. "I believe that modern inequity is compounded by geographic disadvantages and limited access to transportation. A major goal of this project will be to analyze the effects of new infrastructure on the original population while accounting for the effects of gentrification. Furthermore, I hope to provide a method of predicting the income changes of the original residents of a community based on the type and quality of infrastructure implemented."
Previous recipients of the Eisenhower Transportation Graduate Fellowship from the department include James Wood, 2013; Emma Rearick, 2016; Rial Carver, 2018; Rachel Foss and Andrew Young, 2018 and 2019; and Amber Berg, Scott Hazelton, Brennan Walter in 2019. Students in the regional & community planning program have been awarded a total of $119,900 in support from the fellowship program.
