Pacific Southwest Region University Transportation Center honors Uriah Campos
Urban studies major Uriah Campos has been named the Pacific Southwest Region (PSR) University Transportation Center’s Undergraduate Student of the Year.
The honor recognizes students from the region who excel within the transportation field. Campos is the first UC Irvine student to win the award.
Many of Campos’ research projects have been inspired by his living in Diamond Bar. So much so that fellow residents would recognize their points of origin. For instance, Campos’ first project was about using land more efficiently by reusing areas like abandoned malls to turn into living spaces.
“You see a lot of indoor malls like department stores going bankrupt and they’re just sitting there, and I thought you can’t just keep putting spirit Halloweens everywhere,” Campos says. “Even now looking back, you see these projects like Main Place Mall where they just built apartments in part of the parking lot, and Brea Mall is also going under a huge renovation to build more housing where the former Sears was. So, overall it’s really exciting to me to see projects like that actually come into play.”
The project was assigned to him while he was pursuing his Geographic Information System (GIS) degree specialization. It was his third year in his Advanced GIS class with Jessica Garrison, assistant professor of teaching in urban planning and public policy.
Garrison lined up the project to match the criteria for the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG) regional conference in Palm Desert. Campos created a StoryMap and submitted his work for the student showcase and was selected as a finalist to present his project at the conference.
He met his supervisor for UCI’s Institute of Transportation Studies (ITS) at that conference and he was encouraged to apply for an undergraduate summer research position at ITS and got it. Through the Transportation Undergraduate Research Assistant Program (TURAP) from ITS, he started research on equitable design of e-scooters and e-bikes around cities with Michael Hyland, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering.
“There were topics you had to pick from when going into the TURAP program. When I was looking at the topics, the one about e-scooters sparked my interest because I’ve been on those e-scooters in LA before,” he says. “I think they’re fun, but they’re also pretty convenient as well. So, part of why I wanted to research that was because I feel like, here in Irvine, we don’t have many e-scooters as LA does, and it’s definitely something we could benefit from, because Irvine is not the most walkable city at all. So, being able to take an e-scooter or e-bike to the grocery stores and back to your apartment would be super nice. Part of my research led me to read a lot about how college campuses and college towns really benefit from usage. For programs that use e-scooters, it shows that college towns are one of the main demographics for people who are more likely to use them.”
Campos presented that research at the Transportation Research Board (TRB) Annual Meeting in Washington, DC, in January. It was at that conference where he found out he had been named PSR Undergraduate Student of the Year. He was notified by his supervisor during the conference’s reception dinner and many of the other attendees were there to congratulate him.
“I just felt really honored to be recognized,” he recalls. “I’m really glad I ended up pursuing what I was passionate about, and this confirms it. Being passionate about these topics really allowed me to want to do more, and it pushed me to apply for these programs and attend these conferences. So, it was really exciting to see that all that hard work had paid off in the end, and that I’m actually being recognized for it. I really appreciate it.”
Campos is set to graduate this year. He hopes to start his career in planning, but is not sure what his ultimate path will be. It is no surprise that Campos is also interested in transportation and that he hopes to one day find out which path between the two is right for him.
“I definitely want to start a career in the planning field,” he says. “I’m really passionate about building out more communities and positive environments that align with transit friendly developments. Being in urban studies, you see how much the surrounding environment has an impact on the people living there, so it's really good to be a part of that positive impact in planning, so I definitely want to pursue a career within it.”
— Lois Kim