Get to know this year’s Pacific Southwest Region University Transportation Center (PSR UTC) Students of the Year! Every year, faculty from across the ten PSR institutions nominate students pursuing transportation- related degrees based on technical skills, academic performance, and leadership qualities. One graduate student is selected as the UTC’s U.S. Department of Transportation Outstanding Student of the Year while the other four student winners are selected as Student of the Year within their particular degree levels. The 2025 winners are:

• USDOT Outstanding Student of the Year
  Aisling O’Reilly, USC, PhD in Urban Planning and Development
  
  
• PSR UTC Doctoral Student of the Year
  Yanlin Qi, UC Davis, PhD in Transportation Technology and Policy
  
  
• PSR UTC Master’s Student of the Year
  Jon Atkins, UC Berkeley, Masters in Civil Engineering and City Planning
  
  
• PSR UTC Undergraduate Student of the Year
  Ava Elia, Northern Arizona University, B.S. in Geography, Environment, and Society
  
  
• PSR UTC Certificate Program Student of the Year
  Ritchel Reynes, CSULB, Global Logistics Professional Certificate Program

USDOT Outstanding Student of the Year

Aisling O’Reilly is a Ph.D. candidate in Urban Planning and Development at the University of Southern California where she is finishing her dissertation research. Aisling’s main interest is in mobility for those who have physical or cognitive mobility constraints. Despite the 42.5 million Americans affected, there is surprisingly little research on how those with limited mobility manage work, other essential activities, or engage in social activities. Her work has the potential to make an important contribution to a problem that has not been adequately addressed, leading to better models of specialized transportation, expansion of virtual interaction opportunities, or customized automated vehicles.

Aisling has received three Eisenhower awards, one a full-year fellowship, as well as fellowships from WTS and the Railway Association of Southern California. Her research has been supported in part by a PSR competitive research award. She is currently serving a two-year term as Director of Accessibility Affairs for the USC Graduate Student Government. She has served as student representative on the Price School PhD Committee and as Co-President of the Price School PhD Student Association. She has been an effective mentor to junior PhD students and directly managed the work of undergraduate students engaged as part of a research project with the South East LA Collaborative.

Professor Dr, Genevieve Giuliano notes, “We typically require a master’s degree of incoming PhD students. Ms. O’Reilly had only a bachelor's degree in urban studies, yet her potential for advanced work was so clear that we accepted her. I was assigned as her advisor, and I must say she has performed beyond expectations.”

PSR UTC Doctoral Student of the Year

Yanlin Qi is a Ph.D. candidate in Transportation Technology and Policy at the University of California, Davis, specializing in data-driven safety-critical transportation systems. She is also a transportation safety scientist developing knowledge-driven decision systems for U.S. highway safety. Her work focuses on enabling FHWA and state DOTs to make reliable, defensible, and proactive safety investments when crash data are sparse, delayed, or incomplete. She works at the intersection of roadway safety, Crash Modification Factors (CMFs), and knowledge-based transportation modeling, translating federal safety research into tools that agencies can use for real-world infrastructure decisions.

She is a first-author researcher in leading SCI journals including Accident Analysis & Prevention, Transactions in GIS, and Science of the Total Environment, with research support from Caltrans, CTECH, and the National Center for Sustainable Transportation (NCST). Her work bridges national safety policy and operational transportation systems, with deployments inside Caltrans and Amazon Prime Air.

Professor Michael Zhang notes that “For her exceptional scholarship, technical innovation, demonstrated public impact, professional maturity, and genuine leadership, Yanlin is highly deserving of recognition as the 2025 PSR Doctoral Student of the Year. She has already changed the way transportation agencies can make evidence-based infrastructure decisions, and I am confident she will continue shaping the future of safe [and] intelligent mobility systems.”

PSR UTC Master's Student of the Year

Jon Atkins is a student at the University of California, Berkeley where he is currently completing his Master’s Degree in Civil Engineering & City Planning. He is an experienced data scientist, engineer, and urban policy expert with a passion for finding creative, human-centered, data-driven solutions to improve urban infrastructure systems and strengthen communities.

During Jon’s summer internship at NYU’s Visualization, Imaging, and Data Analytics Lab, he introduced StreetTransformer, a large-scale project that led to two sub-projects built on a shared data foundation but serving distinct purposes. The dataset assembled and reconciled four data modalities into a unified spatio-temporal framework: two decades of orthorectified aerial imagery, time-aware planimetric features, capital reconstruction project records, and thousands of planning documents from NYC DOT archives. The result spans approximately 130,000 NYC intersections, 1.3 million aerial snapshots and over 33,000 document pages with cross-modal links.

Jon’s work has been accepted into highly competitive forums including Google Research’s Urban Mobility Foundation Models workshop at ACM SIGSPATIAL (the premier conference in geographic information systems) and a poster at the NeurIPS (the world’s largest machine learning conference) Urban AI workshop.

Professor Maryam Hosseini notes, “In five years of working with graduate students across multiple institutions (MIT, NYU, UW, and UC Berkeley) Jon stands among the most talented, creative, and collegial students I have worked with. He is thoughtful, ethical, collaborative, and a team-player. Someone who grasps concepts quickly but remains open to learning new skills and approaches. He thinks beautifully about complex problems and brings creative vision to his work.”

PSR UTC Undergraduate Student of the Year

Ava Elia is a student at Northern Arizona University where she is currently completing her B.S. degree in Geography, Environment and Society. She has served as President of the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE), where she led student engagement, coordinated guest speakers, and promoted professional development. She is currently an undergraduate research assistant at AzTrans (The Arizona Laboratory for Applied Transportation Research) where she’s worked on projects concerned with pedestrian safety treatments and travel demand modeling. Most recently, she completed a roadway design and planning internship with Wilson & Company. She is a co-author on a paper entitled “How do Leading Pedestrian Intervals (LPIs) Impact Turning Vehicle-Pedestrian Conflict Frequencies and Severities? An Observational Study Before and After LPI Implementation” which was presented at the 2025 Transportation Research Board (TRB) Annual Meeting and subsequently published in the Transportation Research Record journal in May 2025.

Professor Brendan Russo notes, “Ava has been involved with all aspects of transportation research, including literature review, data collection and analysis, and report writing. She has proven to be an exceptional undergraduate research assistant. She is able to work efficiently and professionally both independently and in collaboration with other undergraduate and graduate students.”

PSR UTC Certificate Program Student of the Year

Ritchel Reynes recently completed the Global Logistics Professional Certificate Program from the Center for International Trade and Transportation at California State University, Long Beach. Students in the GLP program receive practical instruction from industry experts on a wide range of logistics-related topics including how to cost the movement of goods nationally and internationally, the role of information technology, and how to address compliance issues. Like many who attend the program, Ritchel was attracted to the GLP program because it serves as an opportunity to gain critical knowledge about the industry in which she works and to position herself for advancement. Ritchel is currently working at Nancy’s Beauty Warehouse as an E-Commerce Department Manager but prior to that she dedicated ten years to Hapag-Lloyd Philippines, an ocean carrier. Additionally, she worked at an international freight forwarding company for three years, with positions primarily centered around ocean freight. She is driven by her passion for the logistics industry; however, she understood that her previous experience outside the US isn't widely acknowledged given the difference in the market conditions, policies, and the multimodal services available in the US.

The GLP program was a valuable way for Ritchel to develop her skill set and knowledge of logistics operations in the US. Reynes’ was granted a scholarship from the Container and Intermodal Institute, a national association dedicated to promoting international trade and educating professionals scholarship for her demonstrated leadership potential in the industry.

Thomas O’Brien, Associate Dean at Cal State Long Beach’s College of Professional and Continuing Education notes, “Ritchel demonstrates the potential for leadership in the transportation industry and reflects the value of the diversity of METRANS-related education and training. She excelled in the program while balancing work, school and home life.”