Can you share a little bit about yourself and your role at SafeTREC?
Professionally, I’m trained as an epidemiologist with experience in environmental and occupational health and also infectious diseases. For the past decade, I’ve also been involved as a volunteer pedestrian and bicycle advocate in the city of Berkeley, and over that time, I’ve used my professional training to move into the world of traffic safety from a public health perspective. I started working at SafeTREC about a year ago as a Research Data Analyst, and I also just finished my first year in the PhD program in Epidemiology at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health.
What sparked your interest in transportation safety research?
I was born and raised in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in a very car-dependent neighborhood. In high school, I drove myself or was driven a half mile to school every day. After college, I moved to New York City and experienced the freedom of moving around a city without a car. When I moved to the Bay Area in 2008, I continued to use active and shared transportation modes to get around and generally felt safe doing so. But after having children a few years later, the street safety risks I had previously been willing to accept as an adult suddenly seemed unacceptable for young children. I became a Safe Routes to School Parent Champion and this started my interest in making our streets safer for users of all ages and abilities. I’ve been involved in safe streets advocacy for nearly a decade now, co-founding Berkeley’s pedestrian and bicycle advocacy organization (Walk Bike Berkeley) in 2018, and have finally made the transition to transportation safety research as a career.
What current projects are you working on at SafeTREC?
I’ve been involved in a wide variety of research projects at SafeTREC so far, including research on the efficacy of police traffic enforcement, how to set safer speed limits (see the California Safe Speeds Toolkit), and how different municipalities have handled conflicts that arise when safe streets infrastructure projects are perceived to increase emergency response times. I’m also about to begin a project looking at trends in hit and run crashes in California and the United States, especially how those may have changed since the start of the COVID pandemic.
What issues are you particularly interested or passionate about?
I’m most interested in creating a healthy, safe, and just transportation system that maximizes access to opportunities and minimizes harm to people and the planet. For me, that means taking a public health and justice-based approach to transportation, both with respect to the problems we’re trying to solve (traffic-related injuries and fatalities) but also with respect to our proposed solutions to these problems. Too often in the U.S., we have turned to transportation “solutions” that imbed biases against low-income communities or racially minoritized groups in ways that create a wide range of health and transportation-related disparities. The focus of my research is to uncover the policies, practices, and institutions that create injustices in the transportation system while harming or failing to improve transportation safety. Two examples include the current use of traditional police traffic enforcement and the historical use of urban renewal practices, including highway building.
What do you like to do outside of work?
Between work at SafeTREC, my PhD program, and city advocacy, I don’t have a ton of extra time, but when I’m free, I love to cook, eat, hike the East Bay hills, and spend time with my family playing board and card games. I also enjoy reading books, usually either dystopian novels or nonfiction works about cities or racial injustice (or the intersection of the two!).
This Spotlight interview was conducted in collaboration with UC Berkeley SafeTREC. The opinions and perspectives expressed are those of the interviewee and not necessarily those of SafeTREC.
