Josie Gray and Hannah Thomas-Russell are both seniors on the Embry-Riddle women's track and field team and both are pursuing master's degrees in Civil Engineering. They both have enjoyed success in their athletics endeavors, but recently, they were also able to celebrate their achievements in the classroom as they were named recipients of the Dwight David Eisenhower Transportation Fellowship Program from the U.S. Department of Transportation's Federal Highway Administration.

The program awards fellowships to students pursuing degrees in transportation-related disciplines by encouraging future transportation professionals to seek advanced degrees while helping to retain top talent in the U.S. transportation industry.

The ERAU duo is using evidenced-based research to study two very different areas in the transportation realm. Gray's research is focused on fatalities among first responders, while Russell is working to develop quantifiable measures of system resiliency of any discrete transportation system. 
 

Gray is in her fourth season with the ERAU cross country and track & field programs. She is a two-time Sunshine State Conference Commissioner's Honor Roll selection who also garnered Academic All-Peach Belt Conference and CoSIDA Academic All-District honors. She was a USTFCCCA All-Region selection in the 5,000m and distance medley relay events in 2019 and holds the school record in the 3,000m (10:23.99) and the 5,000m (18:12.92).

 

GRAY'S ABSTRACT First responders face many hazards that put their lives at risk while on duty. Over the period of 1992-97, 887 law enforcement personnel and 259 firefighters were killed in the line of duty (Clarke, 1999). An inherent danger comes with the duties of emergency response. A review of the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund statistics shows that 553 police officers died in the line-of-duty between 2008 and 2017 as a direct result of a traffic related incidents. That represents more than 36 percent of all on-duty fatalities and is even higher than the number of police officers lost to gun violence over the same period. Sadly, the nation's first responders are exposed to factors which make them uniquely vulnerable to traffic related injuries and deaths. The goal of this research is to investigate and analyze crashes involving first responder vehicles. This will be achieved by gathering police, fire, and ambulance vehicle crash reports from Signal Four Database from across the state of Florida from 2016 to 2018. Based on the database, approximately 1% of the crashes were first responder vehicles. The data set will be used to look at frequency and severity levels between first responders and the general public. Additionally, an evaluation will be conducted on individual responder vehicle groups; police, fire, and ambulance. This project is expected to help identify factors and situations that can lead to increased risk for first responders on Florida roadways. Potential recommendations discovered through this research should be used to protect the lives of first responders.

 

Russell was a two-sport athlete at Embry-Riddle having played two seasons (2016-17) with the Eagles' softball team in addition to competing in track and field in 2019-20. Russell saw limited competition in track and field this year with the season being cut short due to COVID-19, but she recorded 23 hits, seven RBI and 13 runs scored with 303 putouts on the softball field.

 

RUSSELL'S ABSTRACT The National Science Foundation's definition of resiliency is "the ability to prepare and plan for, absorb, recover from, or more successfully adapt to actual or potential adverse events" (National Science Foundation, 2016). While this definition is informative and useful, it lacks a quantitative reference. There is a need for a method of quantifying resilience to better plan and prepare for system wide disruptions. The research effort described herein provides a quantifiable measures of system resiliency, consistent with NSF's definition.  Fundamentally, a system disruption can be partitioned into five distinctive states: the stable pre-event state, the absorption state, the disrupted state, the recovered state, and stable recovered state. The proposed method identifies these states by measuring system output and quantifies each component on a value scale between zero and one. The resiliency measure then unifies these metrics to provide an overall assessment of resiliency, which accounts for the system's ability to absorb, recover, and adapt. This approach to quantifying resiliency is applicable to any real-world or simulated system with measurable outputs. This paper first documents the development of the resiliency quantification method and then applies the method toward five complex, real world, transportation systems undergoing disruptions.  These case studies consisted of six maritime port, three airports, three power grids, two localized refueling systems, and the Colorado Department of Transportation's cyber network. Each system had a measurable drop in functionality due to a disruption. In general, the results of this research showed that the proposed method of quantifying resiliency can be utilized for any transportation system.