NDSU transportation and logistics doctoral student Yun Zhou recently was named a 2022 Lifesavers Traffic Safety Scholar and attended the Lifesavers National Conference on Highway Safety Priorities in Chicago.
Zhou is one of 43 U.S. and international students selected through a competitive application process. The Lifesavers Conference showcases the latest research, evidence-based strategies, proven countermeasures and promising new approaches for addressing the nation’s most pressing traffic safety problems.
Zhou also is a graduate research assistant with the Upper Great Plains Transportation Institute, where she is involved in several transportation safety research projects. She holds a master’s degree in statistics from NDSU and earned her bachelor’s degree in agricultural business and management from the University of Minnesota Crookston.
“I learned so much information about the latest research, evidence-based best practices, and free secondary data sources on highway safety issues from experts in the field,” Zhou said. “The conference helped me understand how to connect our research with real-world practices in engineering, education, enforcement and emergency medical services to reduce traffic crashes.”
She noted that participation in the conference advanced her research by saving her months of searching materials. She was also able to network with highway safety professionals from across the country to obtain resources, research ideas, explore potential collaboration and explore career opportunities.
The UGPTI student traffic safety work at NDSU has been supported by the NDDOT Safety Division through the Vision Zero initiative and related Mountain-Plains Consortium projects that give students opportunities to develop their research skills. The consortium is a UGPTI-led, USDOT-funded University Transportation Center that involves eight universities in five states.
This is the seventh year of the Traffic Safety Scholars program, which provides college students the opportunity to attend the Lifesavers Conference, the largest gathering of traffic safety professionals in the U.S. The program’s goals are to showcase the diversity of opportunities in traffic safety and encourage students, regardless of discipline, to pursue a career in a dynamic field that draws from a variety of disciplines from engineering, education and enforcement to communications, business, marketing, medicine, public health, political science, counseling, and more.
The Lifesavers Transportation Safety Scholars Program pays scholarships to help full- and part-time undergraduate and graduate students in a variety of fields defray the cost of attending the nation's largest gathering of traffic safety professionals. Zhou and the other scholars form across the nation learned about career opportunities from a panel of young traffic safety professionals working in the public and private sectors. The scholars continued this career discussion when they met with state and national traffic safety leaders. The Scholars were able to participate in three plenary sessions and 70 workshops featuring leading experts in their fields.
