Congratulations to Dr. Cody Ko for accepting a position as District Traffic Safety Program Engineer at the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) District 2 Traffic Operations Office. Dr. Ko graduated in 2007 from the transportation engineering program back when the UFTI was known as the Transportation Research Center (TRC).
With the guidance of several transportation faculty members, he worked on various transportation research projects as a graduate student, gathering data, implementing focus groups and surveys, performing statistical analyses and more. He also participated in projects related to “Highway-railroad grade crossing safety,” “LOS performance measures for truck traffic” and “ITS countermeasures for pedestrian safety”.
Upon the completion of his masters’ and doctoral degrees in transportation engineering at UF, Dr. Ko returned to South Korea and completed multiple road-traffic safety and site-specific safety improvement projects at the Samsung Traffic Safety Research Institute. These projects were done in cooperation with governmental and non-governmental agencies to reduce damages from road traffic accidents. The results of the studies have been used to develop or revise laws, policies and technical guidelines, or to provide efficient countermeasures on high crash locations for legislators, police agencies, municipalities, the Ministry of Land Infrastructure and Transport (MLIT), and others.
In 2017, Dr. Ko immigrated to the U.S. and began working for FDOT’s District 2 Office as an ATKINS Global embedded consultant and then as a safety studies engineer at the same District, conducting various safety studies, managing safety study contracts, work program projects, push button projects, and he created a maintenance work order for the development and implementation of safety improvement projects. He has now been assigned a new role of District Safety Program Engineer, managing and directing District Safety Engineering and Education Initiatives.
The UFTI operates a great research program to develop and modify engineering principles and procedures to be applied effectively in the real world. I also enjoyed the chance to receive the guidance and support from the faculty members with various concentrations at the UFTI. – Dr. Cody Ko