UC REGENTS - Key Persons
Adrienne L. Joseph is one of UC Berkeley Safe Transportation Research and Education Center's (SafeTREC) Research Administrators. She is part of the Administrative team and is primarily responsible for the center's procurement as well as grant administration. Adrienne has worked for UC Berkeley for over 20 years and holds an Associates Degree in Accounting from Heald Business College.
Role:
Staff
Job Titles:
- Research & Development Engineer at Institute of Transportation Studies
Afsaneh Yavari serves as a Research & Development Engineer at Institute of Transportation Studies, Safe Transportation Research and Education Center (SafeTREC). She manages the Complete Streets Safety Assessment Program and leads the Tribal Road Safety Programs, including Tribal Transportation Safety Assessment. She is registered as a Traffic Engineer (TE) in California. She holds a B.S. degree in Civil Engineering, and a Master's degree in Transportation Engineering.
Before joining University of CA-Berkeley, Ms. Yavari worked in both public and private sectors, which included: TJKM Transportation Consultants, City of Albuquerque, JHK & Associates, City of Tracy, and Wisconsin Department of Transportation. Afsaneh also serves as TechTransfer's Technical Program Engineer, where she updates existing courses and develops new courses.
Role:
Staff
Job Titles:
- Research Data Analyst at the Safe Transportation Research and Education Center
Amalia Stahl is a Research Data Analyst at the Safe Transportation Research and Education Center (SafeTREC) at UC Berkeley. She previously attended Georgetown University where she obtained both her B.A. in mathematics and fine arts and her M.S. in data science and analytics.
Role:
Staff
Ana is a Policy and Program Analyst at SafeTREC. She holds Bachelors' Degrees in Social Welfare and Spanish Language from UC Berkeley and is currently a Master of Urban Planning student at San Jose State University. Through her experience in data collection and research, she supports various transportation safety research projects ranging from observing pedestrian and bicycle interactions with the built environment, analyzing the dynamics and limitations of statewide collision records systems, and engaging with local residents and safety advocates with the objective of...
Job Titles:
- Policy and Program Analyst
- Program Analyst at SafeTREC
Areli Ariana Balderrama is a Policy and Program Analyst at SafeTREC. They hold a BA in Comparative Literature, a minor in Black Studies from UC Santa Barbara, and a Master of Public Health + a Master of Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Michigan. Through their experience in data visualization, policy and research, they will support projects that promote healthier and safer communities.
Role:
Staff
Carlos Navarro is a Student Assistant at UC Berkeley SafeTREC and an undergraduate student majoring in Data Science with a domain emphasis in Geospatial Information and Technology.
Role:
Student Assistant
Job Titles:
- Co - Director, SafeTREC
- Founding Director of SafeTREC
Dr. Ragland is the founding director of SafeTREC and an Adjunct Professor Emeritus of Epidemiology at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health. He has been the PI on numerous projects funded at SafeTREC (more than $30M since 2000). Dr. Ragland is also actively involved in the traffic safety efforts of the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) and served as a top-level adviser on California's State Highway Safety Plan (SHSP) and the Federal Highway Administration's (FHWA) mandated 5 Percent report for the Highway Safety Implementation Plan, as mandated by the federal government. Highlights of his recent work include geocoding of collisions on California roadways, a study of High Collision Concentration Locations on California highways, many studies of pedestrian and bicyclist safety, studies of roadway design, driver behavior and vulnerable populations. He has authored more than 100 technical reports and peer-reviewed publications in the traffic safety arena.
Dr. Offer Grembek is a lecturer and former Co-Director at the University of California Berkeley Safe Transportation Research and Education Center (SafeTREC), a research center affiliated with the UC Berkeley School of Public Health and the UC Berkeley Institute of Transportation Studies. Dr. Grembek is a member of the California Strategic Highway Safety Plan Steering Committee and the Transportation Research Board Committee on Transportation Safety Management Systems (ACS10). As a Principal Investigator, Dr. Grembek has obtained multiple sponsored research awards to study pedestrian and bicycle safety issues and safety management. His research expertise includes: injury risk in multimodal environments, pedestrian safety, Safe System and systemic approaches to road safety management, speed management policy, and in-vehicle injury protection systems. Dr. Grembek received his B.Sc. in Industrial Engineering from the Ben Gurion University of the Negev in 2002, his MS in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 2005 and received his PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 2010.
Edna Aguilar is a Master's student in Transportation Engineering and City Planning at UC Berkeley. She obtained her B.S. in Civil Engineering at the George Washington University in Washington, DC. After graduating, she worked for three years as a civil engineer for a variety of private and public infrastructure projects. Her current interests include clean transportation, active modes, and spatial analysis. She was born and raised in Mexico City.
Role:
Graduate Student Researcher
Garrett Fortin is a Policy & Program Analyst at the UC Berkeley Safe Transportation Research and Education Center (SafeTREC). He designs and implements active transportation safety programs and supports traffic safety projects via data analysis at the local and state levels.
Previously, Garrett worked as an Americorps VISTA in San Jose with a college access nonprofit. He received a Masters degree in Social Policy from the University of Pennsylvania.
Role:
Staff
Job Titles:
- Lecturer
- Lecturer and Visiting Policy Analyst
- Research and Policy Advisor at CalOSHA
- Retired
Glenn Shor retired as Research and Policy Advisor at CalOSHA, California Department of Industrial Relations in December 2019. He managed California/BLS Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries program, and worked with Workers' Compensation Information System (WCIS). From 2010 to 2012, he was on loan as Special Assistant to the Assistant Secretary of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, US Department of Labor, Washington DC.
He served in several positions in California's Division of Workers' Compensation (DWC) including Project Manager, Chief of Policy and Legislation, and acting Research Manager. He served as principal consultant for workers' compensation for the California Senate Industrial Relations Committee and staff member of the Senate Office of Research.
Glenn Shor is a lecturer and affiliated researcher with the Center for Occupational and Environmental Health at U.C. Berkeley, where he co-teaches a School of Public Health course on injury prevention and control. He also is a lecturer in the Department of Public Health at CSU-Sacramento, where he teaches Occupational Health and Safety Law and Regulation.
He is an active member and chair of History group of the Occupational Health and Safety Section of the American Public Health Association. Also on Editorial Board of New Solutions, and has co-edited journal issues on Workers' Compensation (2000) and a special issue commemorating the 100th anniversary of the APHA/OHS section (2014). He was recently a member of the National Academy of Sciences study panel on "Developing a Smarter National Surveillance System for Occupational Safety and Health in the 21st Century."
Shor has a Ph.D. and Masters in Public Policy (MPP) from the Graduate School of Public Policy (now Goldman School of Public Policy) at U.C. Berkeley, and a B.A. from University of Pennsylvania.
Role:
Staff
Han Wang is a Graduate Student Researcher at the UC Berkeley Safe Transportation Research and Education Center (SafeTREC). His research interest is the application of multi-agent systems in transportation engineering. Han is participating in the Bicycle Level of Service project in SafeTREC and helping to build a cycling simulator based on a Virtual Reality system.
Han Wang also developed SafeTport(link is external) - a traffic safety crowdsourcing data collecting app that allows users to view and report traffic safety risks and crashes in their community.
Role:
Graduate Student Researcher
Job Titles:
- Research Data Analyst
- Transport Planner
Ipsita Banerjee is a transport planner with interests in sustainability, transit research, and travel demand analysis. She has worked at SafeTREC as a graduate student researcher and as a policy and program analyst. In her present role as Research Data Analyst, she works on Caltrans's project on Safe Systems Research and Implementation. Outside of SafeTREC, she has led efforts on travel demand analysis of Electronics City commuters, and ridership prediction for a transit authority, both for the city of Bangalore, India. She was also a lecturer at UC Berkeley, teaching the graduate course on public transportation systems.
Ipsita has a Masters in Planning (Transport) from the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi, and her MS and PhD in Transportation Engineering from UC Berkeley.
Role:
Staff
At SafeTREC, Jarah coordinates Street Story: a community engagement platform that collects information about transportation collisions, near-misses, hazards, or safe places to travel. She provides technical assistance to organizations and agencies on how to use the tool within the communities they serve. Jarah also serves as support staff for the Community Pedestrian and Bicycle Safety Training program.
Previously, Jarah worked as a Biorepository Specialist at the University of Mississippi Medical Center. In this capacity, she collected health information, blood specimens and...
Job Titles:
- Research Administrator at the Safe Transportation Research and Education Center
Jeffrey Chang is a Research Administrator at the Safe Transportation Research and Education Center (SafeTREC). He assists the Finance Manager in administering SafeTREC's finances and also works with research staff to help coordinate project activities. He started working at SafeTREC as a student assistant, and after receiving his degree in Molecular and Cell Biology at UC Berkeley, joined SafeTREC full-time.
Role:
Staff
Job Titles:
- Co - Director
- Co - Director of the UC Berkeley Safe Transportation Research
- Co - Director of the UC Berkeley Safe Transportation Research and Education Center
Jill Cooper is the Co-Director of the UC Berkeley Safe Transportation Research and Education Center (SafeTREC). She facilitates multi-disciplinary traffic safety and injury prevention planning. She is the principal investigator on projects involving pedestrian and bicycle safety, crowdsourced data collection, community-level safety planning, and statewide highway safety planning.
Jill has also served as a mediator, and has taught mediation and negotiation at several universities. She received a Masters degree in Social Welfare from UC Berkeley.
Julia is the Safety Research Lead at SafeTREC and serves as technical lead on projects related to bicyclist and pedestrian safety. Her research expertise and interests include collection and processing of nonmotorized transportation data, bicyclist and pedestrian and exposure modeling, improving access to safety data, and bicyclist level of service measures.
Julia developed her first pedestrian exposure model for her master's thesis in Geography at San Francisco State in 2006. She began working at SafeTREC as a graduate student researcher in 2009, continued as a postdoctoral scholar...
Job Titles:
- Senior Policy & Program Analyst
Katherine Chen is a Senior Policy & Program Analyst at SafeTREC where she coordinates multidisciplinary transportation injury prevention planning and research. She manages the Community Pedestrian and Bicycle Safety Program (CPBSP) as well as projects involving active transportation, teen driver safety, community-level safety planning, and statewide highway safety planning.
Previously, Katherine coordinated public health research with community health centers and served as an Emerson National Hunger Fellow. She received her BA in Public Health from UC Berkeley and MPP from the University of Michigan.
Role:
Staff
Kristen Leckie is a Policy & Program Analyst at the UC Berkeley Safe Transportation Research and Education Center (SafeTREC). They will be supporting the Community Pedestrian and Bicycle Safety Training (CPBST) program and active transportation communications. Prior to joining SafeTREC, Kristen worked as a Senior Community Organizer at the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition where they worked alongside community members, advocacy groups and city agencies to implement bike and pedestrian safety projects. In particular, they led major projects to reprioritize park spaces for those walking, biking and rolling with an emphasis on partnering with both senior and disability communities. Kristen received a BA in Anthropology and Gender and Women's Studies at UC Berkeley.
In their free time, Kristen enjoys trips to the park with their senior dog, biking to local coffee shops and reading science fiction.
Role:
Staff
Lekshmy Hirandas is a city planning graduate student at UC Berkeley. She is an architect-urban designer from Kochi, India, and worked with a global non-profit organization before joining the program. Her work at the World Resources Institute(link is external) in Mumbai, India focused on designing safe and accessible streets under the Bloomberg Initiative for Global Road Safety. At UC Berkeley, her work is focused on transportation planning and Just Transition.
Role:
Graduate Student Researcher
Lin Yang is a PhD candidate in the Transportation Engineering field of University of California, Berkeley and a graduate student researcher at UC Berkeley SafeTREC. He is under the supervision of Professor Michael Cassidy and Doctor Offer Grembek. His main interest lies in the relationship between transportation flow theory and highway safety. His dissertation work is about trying to use shockwave theory to improve CalTrans' hotspot identification accuracy. Previous work also includes developing Safety Performance Functions for CalTrans.
Role:
Graduate Student Researcher
Job Titles:
- Communications and Outreach Lead
Lisa is the Communications and Outreach Lead for SafeTREC and manages center communications for outreach, social media, and two traffic safety related websites. Prior to SafeTREC, Lisa worked at the Center for Public Health Practice and Leadership at Berkeley Public Health, where she lead center communications, was co- instructor for courses on health communications and professional development, and coordinated a new media training series. She has also conducted community based public health research, produced videos, led trainings, and coordinated health communication projects with...
Job Titles:
- Applications Programmer at SafeTREC
Liwei Fu is the Applications Programmer at SafeTREC. She works on taking a data-driven approach to help resolve traffic safety issues. She is involved in building crowdsourced data tools, tribal data analysis, and various other traffic injury mapping tools. She has experience in data management and statistical models, and works with time series and spatial data.
Role:
Staff
Matthew Hui is a graduate student researcher at SafeTREC and a Master's student in Transportation Engineering and City Planning at UC Berkeley. At SafeTREC, Matthew is developing a Safe Speeds Toolkit for the State of California. Previously, Matthew worked as a Transportation Planner for the Washington State Department of Transportation and an Assistant Engineer for the City of San Mateo. Matthew is passionate in advancing multimodal safety and accessibility. Outside of transportation, Matthew enjoys learning about architecture.
Role:
Graduate Student Researcher
Md Mintu Miah is a postdoctoral researcher with the Safe Transportation Research and Education Center (SafeTREC) at UC Berkeley. His research interests include Non-motorized Traffic (Bicycle and Pedestrian), Travel Demand Modeling, Data Mining, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence in transportation engineering. He develops statewide pedestrian and bicycle exposure models to identify road design features or other characteristics of counters/locations to enhance pedestrian and bicyclist safety programs. He also prepares guidelines for count data collection and processing, and evaluates bicycle network connectivity.
Md Mintu Miah obtained his Ph.D. in transportation engineering in 2022 from the University of Texas at Arlington, USA. Before this, he received his M.S. in transportation engineering from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, USA, and a B.S. in civil engineering from Rajshahi University of Engineering and Technology, Bangladesh. He worked as a Lecturer and later Assistant Professor from 2013-2017 at Stamford University, Bangladesh, and Rajshahi University of Engineering & Technology, Bangladesh.
Role:
Postdoctoral Researcher
Job Titles:
- Analyst
- Finance Manager
- Finance Analyst of the UC Berkeley Safe Transportation Research and Education Center
Nancy Leon is the Finance Analyst of the UC Berkeley Safe Transportation Research and Education Center (SafeTREC). She supervises the Administrative team and manages the center's funding from several sponsors.
Nancy has worked for UC Berkeley for over 15 years and holds a Bachelor's of Science in Business Administration from the State University of San Francisco California.
Role:
Staff
Prekshaa Rungta is a student assistant at UC Berkeley SafeTREC and an undergraduate student from Mumbai, India pursuing a degree in the biological sciences, on the Public Health major track.
Role:
Student Assistant
Job Titles:
- Researcher at UC Berkeley SafeTREC
Qianhua Luo is a graduate student researcher at UC Berkeley SafeTREC and is currently pursuing a Master's degree in Civil and Environmental Engineering.
Rachel Strangeway is a Master of City Planning student at UC Berkeley. She earned her B.A. in Mathematics from UC Berkeley, and since graduating has worked in education, solar development, and electric vehicle manufacturing. For five years prior to returning to school she worked as a Quality and Reliability Engineer in the design and production of electric buses for transit agencies. Her interests in transportation planning include road safety, active and sustainable modes, and transportation equity.
Role:
Graduate Student Researcher
Rafael Unda is currently a Master of City and Regional Planning candidate (2023) at UC Berkeley. Previously, he studied Civil Engineering and obtained a Master in Transportation Engineering at Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. Rafael has worked for consulting, government, and academia in transportation and urban planning projects.
Role:
Graduate Student Researcher
Job Titles:
- Application Programmer at the University of California Berkeley Safe Transportation Research
- Application Programmer at the University of California Berkeley Safe Transportation Research and Education Center
Simon Kao is an Application Programmer at the University of California Berkeley Safe Transportation Research and Education Center (SafeTREC). Simon's current projects include building web applications for safety and exposure data. He received his MS in Computer Science from Brown University.
Role:
Staff