“I love this year – awards, projects, and fellowships have kept coming non-stop since January. Seo Youn Yoon won the 2009-10 Graduate Division Dissertation Fellowship, and Kate Deutsch won the 2009-10 Brython Davis Endowment Graduate Fellowship” (Professor Kostas Goulias).

Seo’s UCSB Affiliates Graduation Dissertation Fellowship of $3000 goes toward financing her doctoral research in the area of Transportation Modeling. Seo is interested in disaggregate (household level) modeling of trips, using structural equations. She plans to examine existing travel behavior data sets from California and the Seattle-Tacoma area to test her hypotheses about mode choice, decision making, destination choice, and route selection.

Kate’s Brython Davis Fellowship provides a $6,000 stipend and fee support for her dissertation research: “My research focuses on destination choice and the process of this decision making. For my dissertation I will be developing a survey with GPS-enabled instrumentation to collect activity patterns and time use data from respondents.  I hope to expand current modeling techniques in destination choice to include determinants about the interaction of a person with his/her environment as well as indicators about social interactions.  This will be done in order to enhance the robustness and explanatory power of our predictive modeling of travel behavior.  This fellowship is given to graduate students who have a parent who has or is serving in the US Navy or Marines, so a big 'thanks' is due to my dad who served our country in the US navy.”