Stephen Spana, a senior Civil Engineering major at UF, has spent his summer as a transportation intern working on a project to calibrate a theoretical expression that describes the meeting rate between ride-sourcing vehicles, such as Uber, and waiting customers.

Working with two of Dr. Yafeng Yin’s Ph.D. students, Liteng Zha and Zhibin Chen, Spana has quickly learned to set up the simulation, including the project’s various parameters, in a program called Netlogo, despite having no prior coding experience.

Spana credits everyone he’s worked with for helping him learn a great deal in a short amount of time and for providing an excellent educational experience and opportunity this summer. He hopes to continue working in transportation research, focusing on systems analysis and demand forecasting and plans to eventually attend graduate school in the transportation engineering program at UFTI. Spana says he would like to build on his prior research experiences, which include working as a research assistant with Dr. Siva Srinivasan and Ph.D. candidate Miguel Lugo during the past school year, along with the 2015 TRIP summer internship.