RUTAHC

Hello, I’m Grant! I’m currently wrapping up my undergraduate in Civil Engineering and preparing for my masters in Transportation and Traffic Engineering. Since elementary school, when my dad and I would ride to school on a tandem bike, I’ve loved commuting anywhere that I can on a bike. You may even see me riding around town on my six-foot-tall bike, a personal creation of two bike frames welded together. From riding bikes so much, I started to pay attention to the way that our cities design their streets.

At the same time, I started studying civil engineering because I was interested in working on large-scale projects. I was enjoying learning about physics and chemistry, but when I started my first Transportation Engineering class, I realized that transportation was my favorite. I started looking up articles related to city planning and safety, and learned about bicycle level of traffic stress, walk score, link-node ratio, and other concepts that I’d experienced intuitively as a cyclist and pedestrian. I was really satisfied to learn that these questions and ideas that I’ve been collecting for years had research papers, explanations, and formulas. This is the point that I decided that I wanted to go for my masters in transportation and begin doing research for cycling and pedestrian infrastructure and safety.

I am currently doing research about measuring a cyclist’s psychological stress in response to interactions with motor vehicles and various urban infrastructures. This topic not only interests me personally, but professionally I believe that this topic is very important to study to understand what may cause a potential cyclist not to choose to bike. I am excited to be on the team that gets to conduct this research! 

Outside of school and work, I love to get outdoors and active with sports like climbing and slacklining. I also love language learning and am studying Spanish and Japanese every day. I am excited for the day that I get to travel the world and put my studying to the test!