Contact: Margaret Kovar
STARKVILLE, Miss.--Mississippi State doctoral student Jamie L. Boydstun is being honored as the National Center for Intermodal Transportation for Economic Competitiveness Student of the Year.
A former Winston County resident now living in Starkville, Boydstun is a graduate research assistant at the university's nationally recognized Social Science Research Center. She recently was selected in competition among students with research interests and experience in various transportation areas.
Boydstun completed MSU bachelor's and master's degrees in sociology in 1992 and 2009, respectively.
As this year's NCITEC winner, she will receive a $1,000 award and have travel expenses covered to attend the 2013 Transportation Research Board's annual meeting in Washington, D.C. As part of the mid-January meeting, she formally will be presented the honor at the Council of University Transportation Centers awards banquet.
Boydstun currently is exploring the social aspects of transportation. With assistant sociology professor Guangqing Chi, she has completed one research project titled "Gasoline Price Changes and Residential Relocation: Evidence from the American Housing Survey, 1996-2008."
Their research won a second-place award at the Fourth Annual Transportation Workshop held earlier this year at MSU.
NCITEC was founded in January as a University Transportation Center under the sponsorship of the U.S. Department of Transportation. A consortium of MSU, universities of Denver and Mississippi and Louisiana State and Hampton universities, it works to promote the development of an integrated, economically competitive, efficient, safe, secure, and sustainable national intermodal transportation system. For more, visit www.ncitec.msstate.edu.
With support from the organization, Boydstun and Chi are involved in a new project to examine intermodal transportation systems by using the 2009 National Household Travel Survey. It is the first attempt to comprehensively understand passenger usages of the intermodal transportation system.
Under the supervision of professor Lynne Cossman, she is completing a doctoral dissertation that explores how the relationship between obesity and morbidity has changed across cohorts.
In the future, she plans to investigate links between health and transportation, including explanations for increasing obesity prevalence in relation to transportation and transportation's role in socioeconomic differences of medical care access.