WESTERN TRANSPORTATION INSTITUTE - Key Persons
Andrea Hamre, PhD, is a Research Associate in the Mobility and Public Transportation Program with over a decade of experience in transportation research, scholarship, and professional service. Over the course of her career, she has published peer-reviewed research on transport justice, regional planning, multimodal travel, commuter benefits, and cycling. She leverages interdisciplinary training and broad methodological competencies, as well as subject matter expertise in sustainable transportation policy and planning and the analysis of household travel surveys. Her dissertation applied the theory of transport justice developed by Dr. Karel Martens to evaluate low-income access to employer-based transit benefits. Since 2020, she has worked as a Research Associate in the Mobility and Public Transportation Program at WTI. She has led and contributed to technical assistance and research projects related to a variety of transportation issues in rural and small urban communities. Much of her work has focused on the feasibility and improvement of rural transit service, and she has become a team resource for understanding developments in microtransit. She also regularly guest lectures on sustainable transportation, and taught two courses (a short lifelong learning course in 2021, and an intensive undergraduate winter term course in 2022). Dr. Hamre is professionally engaged as a Member of the TRB Standing Committee on Public Transportation Marketing and Fare Policy (AP030).
Dr. Hamre earned a B.A. in Environmental Studies from Middlebury College, as well as a M.S. in Applied Economics and Ph.D. in Planning from Virginia Tech.
Job Titles:
- Professor
- Professor, Program Manager
Dr. Ahmed Al-Kaisy is an professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at Montana State University. He is also the Program Manager for the Safety and Operations Focus Area at the Western Transportation Institute and a registered professional engineer in the state of Montana. Dr. Al-Kaisy has teaching experience in many areas of transportation engineering, including traffic operations and management, traffic flow theory, traffic safety, signal optimization and control, highway design, and intelligent transportation systems. With extensive research experience in the fields of traffic flow, control, operations and safety, Dr. Al-Kaisy has widely published in scholarly journals such as Transportation Research, Transportation Research Records, Journal of Advanced Transportation, and the Journal of Transportation Engineering (to name but a few). He has authored/co-authored around 50 refereed publications of which around 30 are fully refereed journal publications. Dr. Al-Kaisy also has prior experience in both the public and private sector as a contractor, project engineer and highway design engineer and is affiliated with a number of professional organizations.
Jaime Sullivan is a WTI Research Engineer with 17 years of experience. Her focus is in applied rural safety and operations research for Departments of Transportation (DOTs) and Public Lands such as the National Park Service. She currently serves as the Center Manager and a technical liaison for the National Center for Rural Road Safety (Safety Center). In this role, she manages all training programs and technical assistance, develops and maintains the website, leads the monthly webinar series, assists in the development of training videos, and spearheads the development of the National Working Summit on Transportation in Rural America. Jaime is also the Manager for the Public Lands Transportation Fellows (PLTF) program within the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and previously served as the Resource Manager and a technical liaison for the Paul S. Sarbanes Transit in Parks Technical Assistance Center (TRIPTAC).
Jaime's research portfolio focuses on advanced transportation technologies, as well as emerging safety issues such as local road safety, Toward Zero Deaths/Road to Zero strategies, and traffic safety culture. She has extensive experience in the planning, deployment and evaluation of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), leading multiple projects to develop ITS architecture, implementation plans, policy and procedure documents, and operational guidelines. She has also developed and evaluated multiple traveler information systems and created a congestion management toolkit. For the Safety Center, she has conducted recent research to develop a Rural ITS Toolkit, the Local Road Safety Plan handbook, and a Local Road Safety Certificate.
Job Titles:
- Research Associate
- Planning Specialist With
Karalyn Clouser is a GIS and planning specialist with WTI. She has experience editing and managing spatial data to support transportation planning and implementation projects, and offers skills with numerous GIS tools and platforms including ESRI ArcGIS 10.5, QGIS, Trimble GPS Pathfinder Office and Erdas IMAGINE. At WTI, she has provided GIS and planning support to the Paul S. Sarbanes Transit in Parks Technical Assistance Center (TRIPTAC), the Small Urban, Rural and Tribal Center on Mobility (SURTCOM), the West Region Transportation Workforce Center (WRTWC), and the National Center for Rural Road Safety. Ms. Clouser earned her B.S. in Earth Sciences (GIS/Planning) from MSU and is currently working on her Master of Sustainable Transportation at University of Washington.
Job Titles:
- Research Scientist
- Cold Climate Operations and Systems Program Manager, Research Scientist
- Member of the Transportation Research Board
Laura Fay, Research Scientist, serves as the Program Manager for the Cold Climate Operations and Systems research group at the Western Transportation Institute at Montana State University. Mrs. Fay holds a M.S. in Environmental Science and Health from the University of Nevada, Reno and a B.S. in Earth Sciences from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She has over a decade of transportation related research experience and a demonstrated publication record in the areas of winter maintenance operations and environmental issues related to maintenance operations and materials, and low volume roads.
Mrs. Fay is an active member of the Transportation Research Board (TRB) under the National Academies serving as the committee chair for the Low Volume Roads Committee and as a committee member on the Winter Maintenance Committee.
Matt Blank, Ph.D., Civil Engineering, is a Research Scientist studying road and stream interactions with an emphasis on hydrology, hydraulics, and fish passage issues. He has more than 20 years of experience in the environmental arena, with a focus on aquatic passage. At WTI, he expanded the road ecology program to include transportation interactions with aquatic ecosystems.
Matt's research activities focus on characterizing the effects of flow and temperature on fish swimming performance, fish passage assessment and design, stream and river hydraulics, hydrology, bridge and culvert design, and dam removal. He is the co-principal investigator for fish swimming ability and fish passage research being performed at a fish locomotion and research lab in Bozeman. He also teaches applied fluid mechanics for the Department of Civil Engineering at MSU.
Matthew Bell is a Research Associate, working in both the Road Ecology program and the Cold Climate Operations program. His connection to WTI dates back to 2012 when he worked on a Road Ecology project with one of Marcel Huijser's grad students in Missoula, Montana. In 2017, while pursuing grad studies at MSU, he began research with Rob Ament to design wildlife crossing structures from fiber-reinforced polymers. He also conducted his thesis research on modeling the risk of wildlife-vehicle collisions on Montana roads, under the guidance of Dr. Yiyi Wang.
Now at WTI full-time, Matt is continuing his research on designing crossing structures from fiber-reinforced polymers. He is also assisting with projects to test the use of wool products for erosion control and to evaluate friction performance measurement as a winter maintenance strategy.
Matt earned his B.S. in Wildlife Biology from the University of Montana in Missoula and his M.S. in Civil Engineering at Montana State University (MSU) in Bozeman.
Job Titles:
- Research Associate
- in 2019 As a Technical Research Associate
Matt Madsen joined WTI in 2019 as a Technical Research Associate. He joined the Mobility and Public Transportation program area and has taken on bike/pedestrian technical assistance as well as the pop-up neighborhood traffic calming program.
Matt Ulberg holds an M.S. and B.S. in Civil Engineering, from Montana State University. He has 19 years experience working in the private consulting industry. His strengths include working closely with public and private sector clients to solve their engineering challenges. His experience includes proposal development, client management, rural transportation and highway projects, municipal infrastructure projects, right-of-way acquisition, safety studies and traffic engineering. He took the helm as Director of MT LTAP in 2017.
Job Titles:
- Professor in the Civil Engineering Department at Montana State University
- Research Assistant Professor
Michael Berry is a Research Assistant Professor in the Civil Engineering Department at Montana State University focusing on civil structures. He recently completed his doctoral degree in Structural Mechanics, in which he focused on modeling strategies for concrete bridge columns. Dr. Berry's research interests include modeling of reinforced concrete columns subjected to seismic loading, damage prediction in reinforced concrete members, and use of recycled materials as cement and aggregate replacements in reinforced concrete.
Job Titles:
- Research Associate
- Research Associate for the Systems Engineering
Ms. Leann Koon is a Research Associate for the Systems Engineering, Development and Integration group at WTI, where she assists with technical writing, editing, and general research on projects. Ms. Koon has taught and coordinated classroom and laboratory education and training for secondary and post-secondary students. She holds both an undergraduate and a Master's degree in Agricultural Education from Montana State University and has applied research experience in microbiology, plant and crop sciences, and post-secondary education.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Research Professor / Research Engineer
Natalie Villwock-Witte, Ph.D., P.E. is an Assistant Research Professor/Research Engineer at WTI, where she performs research for both the Safety and Operations program, and the Mobility and Public Transportation program. She has more than 13 years of experience, having held numerous engineering positions at the city, county, state and federal levels of government prior to joining WTI. Natalie performs multi-disciplinary research to address the needs of the Federal Highway Administration, federal land managers, state and local departments of transportation in the areas of travel behavior, safety, and bicycle and pedestrian travel. Natalie is the current Chair for the Transportation Research Board (TRB) Committee on the Transportation Needs of National Parks and Public Lands (AEP20, formerly ADA40). She is currently working on projects to define "rural," identify unmet rural transportation needs, identify strategies, and develop case studies; connect rural residents to resources through an eastern Georgia transit hub; and develop case studies for communities of less than 10,000 people with bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure.
In addition to research, Natalie developed and taught engineering courses at Montana State University (MSU), the University of New Mexico (UNM), and Central New Mexico Community College (CNM). She has also worked with the West Region Workforce Transportation Center on education and workforce development initiatives related to careers in the field of transportation.
Job Titles:
- Professor of Civil Engineering at Montana State University
Steven is a Professor of Civil Engineering at Montana State University where he teaches and conducts research in the areas of geotechnical and pavement engineering. Dr. Perkins has been involved in the preparation of several synthesis reports for NCHRP and AASHTO on research and practice of geosynthetics in pavements. He has also helped develop and deliver several short courses and workshops on pavement design with geosynthetics sponsored by industry and agency groups, which were delivered to practicing engineers and departments of transportation. Dr. Perkins is also an instructor of a National Highway Institute course on geotechnical aspects of pavements. His most recent research has focused on the development of mechanistic-empirical pavement design and analysis methods for geosynthetic reinforced pavements.
Job Titles:
- Senior Research Scientist
Anthony (Tony) Clevenger, Ph.D., Wildlife Ecology, is a Senior Wildlife Research Scientist specializing in identifying factors influencing wildlife crossing performance and analyzing factors contributing to wildlife-vehicle collisions. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences Committee on Effects of Highways on Natural Communities and Ecosystems. He has published over 40 articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals and co-authored three books including, Road Ecology: Science and Solutions (Island Press, 2003).