The Women’s Transportation Seminar (WTS) foundation, an organization geared towards advancing women in transportation, awards scholarships to women pursuing careers in transportation through graduate and undergraduate programs.  These scholarship programs are extremely competitive and based on a specific set of criteria.  The Helene M. Overly Scholarship was established in 1981 to honor the first Executive Secretary of WTS for her dedicated service to the organization in public service, organizational abilities and a spirit of determination.  To be eligible for this $10,000 scholarship, applicants must meet specific transportation goals, academic record and transportation-related activities or job skills, and be enrolled in a graduate degree program in a transportation-related field such as engineering, planning, finance or logistics.

Florida International University Civil and Environmental Engineering Graduate student, Angela Kitali was selected as this year’s award recipient.  She will be awarded this prestigious $10,000 scholarship at the WTS Annual Conference in Boston, Massachusetts on Thursday, May 16th during the Annual Awards Gala. Ms. Kitali was also the $2000 award recipient of the South Florida WTS Chapter’s 2019 Helen M. Overly Memorial Scholarship making her entire award total $12,000!

Angela E. Kitali is a Ph.D. Candidate and Research Assistant at Florida International University. She received her M.S. in Civil Engineering from the University of North Florida; and her B.S. in Civil Engineering from the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. Her research interests include transportation safety, real-time data visualization and analysis, traffic incident management, and traffic micro-simulation. In her very short career, she has co-authored over thirty journal papers, conference proceedings, and research reports. One of the research projects that she recently worked on, under the supervision of Dr. Priyanka Alluri, focused on detecting secondary crashes on freeways. In this project, she developed a framework to identify secondary crashes using real-time data. For her dissertation, she is planning to expand on this research by exploring the use of connected vehicles and real-time traffic data in mitigating secondary crashes.

Ms. Kitali is passionate about research and sharing knowledge, and it is something she is envisioning to continue doing in the future. She believes that the journey is more important than the destination. The path that she is on continues to inspire her to live up to her potential and give back to the community. She is hoping to inspire the young generation in the future to pursue their dreams. Ms. Kitali doesn’t believe that she is alone in her professional journey. She has been very lucky to work with the most amazing and devoting advisor, Dr. Alluri. She is grateful to Florida International University for providing her with an opportunity to be involved with different professional organizations including the Women’s Transportation Seminar (WTS) and Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE). Not only has this opportunity provided a platform for her professional, leadership, and mentoring skills excellence, it has also given an opportunity to expand her professional network and interpersonal skills.

Author: Amira Mohammed