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February 2005
David Levinson wins national award
Assistant Professor David Levinson is the recipient of the 2004 New Faculty Award from the Council of University Transportation Centers (CUTC) and the American Road & Transportation Builders Association. The award is presented to an outstanding new faculty member in a field related to transportation who has not yet received tenure. He received the honor at CUTC’s Eighth Annual Awards Banquet in Washington, D.C., last month.
A CTS Faculty Scholar, Levinson takes an interdisciplinary approach to transportation, with an appointment in both the Department of Civil Engineering and the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs. His course offerings range from "Introduction to Transportation Engineering" to "Land Use, Transportation, and the Design of Human Settlements." He has supervised graduate students in both programs, including a recipient of a CUTC award in 2002.
Levinson's primary research activities focus on the economic analysis of transportation systems. His papers on road pricing were collected in Financing Transportation Networks, published by Edward Elgar Publishers in 2002, and his book coauthored with William Garrison, The Transportation Experience: Policy, Planning, and Deployment, will be published by Oxford University Press. He has been a principal or co-principal investigator on 17 sponsored research projects at the University of Minnesota.
Levinson also helped establish the University's Interdisciplinary Transportation Student Organization and serves as its student advisor (see related article), and played a key role in planning and organizing the "Access to Destinations" conference held last November.
Levinson received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1998.
"David is very worthy of this award and I was pleased to nominate him," said CTS director Robert Johns, who presented the award. "I was excited to hear that the selection committee—in what I know is fierce competition—chose him as this year's award winner.
"David has been a key member of our transportation faculty since he joined us in 1999," Johns continued. "He has injected energy and a broad range of interests into our transportation research and education programs. He also doesn't hesitate to challenge the status quo."