The TRB Outstanding Young Member Award, established in 2012, recognizes a distinguished younger member of a TRB standing committee who has demonstrated exceptional service to TRB and achievements in transportation research, policy, or practice. The award, which is administered by the Young Members Council (YMC), is to be presented annually to a TRB volunteer who is 35 years of age or younger on April 15 in the year of the award. The award consists of a plaque and a $2,500 cash award supported by Stantec, Inc.
The deadline for the 2014 TRB Outstanding Young Member Award has come and passed, though if you know of someone who deserves this award, keep an eye out next year around September and October for the call for nominations!
Now, the winner of the 2014 TRB Outstanding Young Member Award: Stephane Hess, PhD, MPhil, Institute for Transport Studies, University of Leeds (UK). He will be recognized in the Thomas B. Deen Lecture and Presentation of Awards Monday, January 13, 2014. Congratulations Stephane, and good luck in all of your future endeavors!
Here is a little more about Stephane:
Stephane Hess is Professor of Choice Modelling in the Institute for Transport Studies at the University of Leeds. He is also Honorary Professor in Choice Modelling in the Institute for Transport and Logistics Studies at the University of Sydney, an external affiliate in the Centre for the Study of Choice (CenSoC) at the University of Technology, Sydney, and a senior technical advisor for Resource Systems Group. He has formerly held posts as a research fellow in the Centre for Transport Studies at Imperial College London and as a senior researcher in the Institute for Traffic Planning and Transport Systems at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zürich (ETH). He has also spent time as a visiting researcher in the Department of Civil Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Hess holds a PhD in transport demand modelling from Imperial College London and a MPhil in Statistical Science from Cambridge University. His main research interests lie in the use of advanced discrete choice models for the analysis of travel behaviour, primarily with the use of stated preference data. Here, Hess has made contributions to the state of the art in the specification, estimation and interpretation of such models, notably in a valuation of travel time savings context, while also publishing numerous papers on the benefits of advanced structures in actual large-scale transport analyses, for example in the context of air travel behaviour research. His contributions have been recognised for example by the 2010 Fred Burggraf award handed out by the Transportation Research Board, the 2005 Eric Pas award for the best PhD thesis in the area of travel behaviour modelling, and the 2004 Neil Mansfield award handed out by the Association for European Transport.
He is also the founding editor in chief of the Journal of Choice Modelling, the founder and steering committee chair of the International Choice Modelling Conference, and the co-chair for the 14th International Conference on Travel Behaviour Research, to be held in London in 2015. He is an associate editor of Transportation Research Part E, and serves on the editorial advisory board of two other leading journals; Transportation Research Part B and Transportation. He is a member of the two key academic transport modelling committees of the Transportation Research Board (Travel Demand Forecasting and Travel Behaviour and Values) and is a member of the board of the International Association for Travel Behaviour Research.