Student Spotlight: Phillip Haas

For Phillip Haas, a diversity of projects is the name of his game at UF. Haas has been a civil engineering graduate student since 2009 specializing in transportation safety. He is currently working toward his doctoral dissertation on three projects that are quite varied in nature.

Haas is working on a STRIDE-funded project, which aims to develop course materials based on the Highway Safety Manual (HSM) for implementation in a classroom setting. The project is headed by Dr. Ilir Bejleri, a faculty member at the Department of Urban and Regional Planning. Coursework is to include examples from the HSM in an excel spreadsheet for students to manipulate into different scenarios.

“From a technical side, it’s straight forward,” Haas said. “The biggest challenge is to make it intuitive to use, which isn’t something you usually have to worry about when doing crash analysis. The end product isn’t a number or result, the end product is something students can use and learn from, so it has to be something students want to use so they can learn from it.”

Hass said that while working on the project, his doctoral dissertation adviser, Dr. Siva Srinivasan, has been key to his success. “Dr. Siva is very knowledgeable, knows exactly when to give a little extra help when you’re stuck at a problem,” Haas said. “He gives a push in the right direction to help you figure it out yourself.”

The other project he is working on focuses on assisting small, rural counties that don’t have the personnel or expertise to identify problematic areas, especially those related to safety. The project titled “Safety Project Development Capacity for Small Communities in Coordination with Local Technical Assistance Program Center”, is headed by Haas’ adviser and in collaboration with Dr. Bejleri and the Local Technical Assistance Program (LTAP) at UF’s T2 Center. Rural roads are analyzed to identify potential projects that could be funded by the federal government or the state for areas prone to traffic safety issues.

“Being able to work on the rural county projects and being able to actually go into the field to meet face to face with the small county personnel is a side you don’t see doing research,” Haas said. “Actually walking the road, seeing in person what it looks like changes the way you see the numbers when you see them on the computer screen.”

A third project Haas is participating in is titled “Crash Prediction Method for Freeway Facilities with High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) and High Occupancy Toll (HOT) Lanes”. This project is collaborative effort between UF and Florida International University on performance function in HOV/HOT lanes.

Haas moved to Tampa, Fla., earlier this year and is able to keep up with his graduate projects easily via the online meeting service GoToMeetings. He hopes to learn as much as possible through the end.

“Moving into doctoral studies, you want to know the state-of-knowledge in the field so you can push yourself into finding something new – a new development,” Haas said. “You have a problem, you know what you can do to fix it. Once that knowledge base is there, then you can look even farther to do something new as a contribution to the field.”

Haas expects to finish his dissertation on crash prediction modeling and performance measurements and graduate in Spring 2015.