This June, a number of colleagues and I presented on transit riders’ health and travel experiences during the 2025 Palisades and Eaton wildfires in Los Angeles. We hosted a workshop and presented our preliminary findings to the LA Mayor’s office, LA Metro, LA DOT emergency management, Waymo, SCAG, and others. This work was supported by the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies and funded through grants from the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies and Natural Hazards Center, Transit Riders’ Health Risks and Adaptive Travel During the Los Angeles Wildfires.

This June, we presented some preliminary researching exploring the connections between short-term displacement, wellbeing, and mobility during the 2023 Vermont floods, at MR2025, hosted by the Columbia Climate School. See the abstracts for the session on social vulnerability & climate risks.

In early June we found out we were awarded a NSF RAPID grant to gather data on abandoned vehicles in the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires! We are very excited to carry out this work. Read more about it here. Photo credit: Getty Images.

This May I went to USU Eastern in Price, Utah for the Utah Conference on Community Engagement. This was an incredible opportunity to meet researchers, practitioners, and community organizers across Utah doing really important community-engaged work. Learning about the mining history of Price, Utah was also fascinating.

This May I went to my first planning conference- APA Utah, which was held in Logan, Utah. This was a good chance to learn more about the issues Utah is currently facing. Front and center is the drying up of the Great Salt Lake, which will likely dry up in the next 5 years. I saw an impactful presentation about Utah farmers’ perceptions on water use vs. housing growth.

The transportation faculty hosted an end of year bbq and potluck for the transportation undergrad and grad students from the engineering and planning departments. It was a lot of fun!

Beginning this April, I am an Associate Editor at Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives (TRIP). I look forward to helping edit this journal and promote new research that spans social science, engineering, and planning. Let’s go! Read more about TRIP here…

This past February I co-authored an op-ed with some of my colleagues, amid the cancelling of millions of dollars of transportation research projects deemed forbidden by the new administration. Read it here in Streetsblog…