NCTSPM Student of the Year Announced: Candace Brakewood

Congratulations to Candace Brakewood, a Georgia Tech student who has been selected as the 2013 NCTSPM Student of the Year!

She will receive her award at the Council of University Transportation Centers Annual Awards Banquet held at TRB in January 2014. For the past 22 years, the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) has honored an outstanding student from each UTC at a special ceremony held during the TRB Annual Meeting. Each student is recognized during the ceremony by a Departmental official. 

The Student of the Year is selected based on academic performance, extracurricular involvement, and leadership in students groups and outreach. Candace has excelled in each of these categories. Candace was instrumental in launching OneBusAway in Atlanta, a traveler information platform that provides real-time bus and train tracking information to passengers through smartphone and web applications.  She is currently working with Dr. Kari Watkins on transit research sponsored through a USDOT Eisenhower Fellowship and an NCTSPM project entitled “Evaluating the Impact of Real-time Transit Passenger Information on Ridership and Mode Share.”

Candace is also actively involved in education at Georgia Tech. She has mentored multiple Master’s and undergrad students, including students through a foreign exchange program between Georgia Tech and Ecole des Ponts Paris Tech in France.  She has supported multiple courses with materials focused on transit planning and operations and was the teaching assistant for the graduate course in Public Transportation Planning and Design.  

Candace is also supportive of professional transportation groups at Georgia Tech and outside the university.  She is the historian for the Georgia Tech Chapter of WTS and is the Deputy Chair of the international board of Young Professionals in Transportation (YPT).

Candace is currently pursuing a PhD in Transportation in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering.  Her doctoral research aims to quantify the impacts of real-time vehicle location information on transit ridership.