PhD Student Feng Miao Wins Intelligent Transportation Award

Feng Miao, a PhD candidate in the Grove School of Engineering at The City College of New York (CCNY), has won the Intelligent Transportation Society of New York’s (ITS-NY) 2010 Student Award.  She will attend ITS-NY’s 17th Annual Meeting and Technology Exhibition, June 10-11, in Saratoga Springs, to receive her award.

Her winning paper, "Application of WIM Technology to Evaluate the Safety of Highway Bridges," describes how site-specific truck weight and traffic data collected using weight-in-motion (WIM) systems can be used to evaluate the safety of bridges in New York State.

“Recent catastrophic failures of bridge structures, such as the collapse of the I-35W Mississippi River Bridge in Minnesota in 2007, the collapse of the I-40 Bridge in Oklahoma in 2002, due to corrosion have alerted the bridge engineering community to the importance of reviewing current bridge safety evaluation procedures and the implementation of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) technology in the safety assessment process,” said Feng.

“The advantage of WIM over traditional static scale weighing is the efficiency obtained when collecting truck weight information automatically as the trucks travel at, or near, normal speeds.”

Feng, who has a 3.85 G.P.A., is concentrating in structural engineering in the Grove School’s civil engineering department. This is the second award she has won during this academic year. Last September, she was awarded the first John Fisher Student Award from the New York Bridge Engineering Conference.

“It’s a great honor for me to get this award for “ITS-NY Best Student Paper,” said Feng. “It is very useful research for the whole city.”