Bloustein doctoral students Ellen O. White and Wei San Loh have are the recipients of Dwight David Eisenhower Transportation Fellowships for the coming year. The fellowships are awarded by the Federal Highway Administration for the Department of Transportation, and are given to doctoral students for their work on transportation planning and policy.
The Dwight David Eisenhower Transportation Fellowship Program (DDETFP) awards merit-based fellowships to students pursuing degrees in transportation-related disciplines. This nationally competitive program advances the transportation workforce by helping to attract the nation’s brightest minds to the field of transportation, encouraging future transportation professionals to seek advanced degrees, and helping to retain top talent in the U.S. transportation industry. DDETFP is administered by the Federal Highway Administration and generally results in 150-200 grants annually, subject to the availability of funds.
Ellen O. White conducts research on the environmental impacts of transportation infrastructure. Her dissertation research focuses on roadside vegetation management practices as implemented in different state and local contexts, and how these policies may impact the local ecology of the surrounding roadside. Prior to starting the PhD program, Ellen received a Master of Urban Planning from Harvard Graduate School of Design and a Master of Landscape Architecture from Rutgers. She is a member of the Transportation Research Board’s Landscape and Environmental Design Committee. Ellen is a repeat recipient, having been awarded a fellowship in 2021.
Wei San Loh is a third-year Ph.D. candidate in the School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Her research interest centers around transportation equity and social mobility. She currently investigates the affordability of used-electric vehicles and accessibility to electric charging stations for lower-income households. Before starting the Ph.D. program, she was a research analyst at the World Bank in Malaysia for three years. During those three years, she contributed to analytical work for policy reforms, including enhancing the national statistical system, poverty and equity analysis, and the migrant labor informational gap in Malaysia. Wei San holds a Master’s degree in International and Development Economics from Yale University and a Bachelor’s degree in Economics from Soka University of America.