GT Researchers Receive Wootan Award from the TRB

Four researchers from Georgia Tech's School of Civil and Environmental Engineering have received this year’s Charley V. Wootan Award from the Transportation Research Board (TRB), recognizing their work on evidence-based transportation asset management. The research team will also be honored with a Certificate of Award, to be presented at the Thomas B. Deen Distinguished Lecute. 

The Wootan Award honors the best paper in transportation policy and organization submitted to the TRB each year.

The winning paper proposes a framework for collecting evidence to document how well transportation asset management interventions accomplish their intended purposes. Ph.D. students Margaret-Avis Akofio-Sowah and Janille Smith-Colin, in their third and fifth years of study, respectively, worked on the research with Jamie Montague Fischer, who finished her doctorate this month, as well as Professor Adjo Amekudzi Kennedy. In compiling the paper, students worked closely with a panel of asset management practicioners to identify key themes and areas of focus.

The project, supported by the Georgia Department of Transportation, will ultimately lead to the development of an evidence-based database for managing transportation infrastructure.  The team has already put in a follow-up paper for the 2015 TRB meeting in January that outlines the design of that database and how it could be used.

Story credit: Joshua Stewart