8 a.m., Dec. 5, 2008----A civil engineering alumna and a current University of Delaware graduate student have been selected to receive awards from WTS, an international organization dedicated to the advancement of women in transportation.

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Delaware Secretary of Transportation Carolann Wicks ('82, '90M) was named the WTS Philadelphia Chapter's Woman of the Year, and graduate student Michelle Oswald received the Sylvia Alston Graduate Scholarship. Alston was a former Amtrak employee who dedicated her life to transportation and supporting women in transportation.

Wicks was cited for representing the Delaware Department of Transportation (DelDOT) with honor and integrity and for making a significant contribution to the transportation system of Delaware and the Mid-Atlantic region.

In 2002 Wicks became the first woman to be named chief engineer/director for DelDOT, and in 2006 she was appointed to the cabinet post of transportation secretary.

During her career with DelDOT, she has been in charge of some of the state's most complex and challenging transportation projects.

Wicks recently was designated the 2008-2009 president for the Northeast Association of State Transportation Officials. She has received a number of other honors and awards, including UD's Presidential Citation for Outstanding Achievement, the Eugene E. Abbott Award for excellence in Transportation Planning (DelDOT's highest honor), and the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials' Alfred E. Johnson Award for Excellence in Engineering and Management.

Advised by Sue McNeil, professor of civil and environmental engineering, Oswald is a second-year master's student in civil engineering, and she plans to continue into the Ph.D. program at UD.

Her thesis research involves developing a sustainability rating system for transportation corridors, analogous to the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) system used for buildings.

“Currently, programs such as LEED focus on design and construction of buildings and provide little documentation of the methodology behind the rating systems,” Oswald says. “So I developed a universal methodology for creating green rating systems and then applied this methodology to develop a sustainable corridor rating system, or SCRS.”

Oswald recently won the student research competition at the 8th National Conference on Access Management for her work in this area. Held in Baltimore from July 13-16, the conference focused on sustainable solutions for transportation.

“Michelle's work is very novel as it marries popular concepts of rating sustainability with a rigorous approach to developing the rating system,” McNeil says. “She is an outstanding student--committed, interested, motivated, hard-working and willing to share her knowledge.”

Oswald is affiliated with the UD University Transportation Center (UTC) on resiliency of transportation corridors. She is a UD-UTC Fellow and was recently named UD-UTC student of the year. She plans to pursue a teaching career in the area of transportation engineering.

Article by Diane Kukich