UFTI Student Interns with FHWA

This summer one of the UFTI’s Ph.D. students, Deja Jackson, participated in an internship program with the Federal Highway Administration for the second time. Jackson interned with the FHWA’s Turner-Fairbank Highway Research Center (TFHRC) in

McLean, VA, where she was one of the first to help analyze the newly collected data from their Motorcycle Crash Causation Study (MCCS). This year, Jackson was part of the Office of Safety under the Roadway Safety Data Program’s Data and Analysis Team and worked specifically with the Highway Safety Manual (HSM).

One of the tasks Jackson completed was tracking state efforts to develop safety performance functions and/or calibrate the existing HSM models for local conditions. Jackson is currently finalizing the report for publication through the Crash Modification Factors Clearinghouse.

Additionally, she performed freeway sensitivity analyses using dis-aggregated data to determine how different road environment variables impact predicted crash frequencies under a given set of assumptions. The results from the numerous sensitivity analyses were documented, compared, and interpreted to capture various freeway cross-sections. These analyses will provide insight into the reduction of overall predicted crash frequencies, and the increase in the number of predicted severe injury and fatal crash frequencies.

Jackson also examined federal and state relations as they pertains to the awareness, accessing, and utilization of the product and services that the FHWA Office of Safety delivers (technical guides, Web-based tools, trainings, etc.), with the intention of improving how these products and services are made available and used as well as the impact that they could have at the state level.

Throughout her internship, Jackson also served as a reviewer for the Road Safety Fundamentals textbook developed by the FHWA Office of Safety’s Implementation & Evaluation Team.