Shirin Najafabadi is a PhD student in Transportation Engineering at the City College of New York. Her 9/11 program internship is with NYMTC and she will work closely with NYMTC Planning Group to work on “Vertical Integration of Land Use and Transportation Planning” project. NYMTC’s members introduced the idea of Coordinated Development Emphasis Areas (CDEAs) in Plan 2045, the recently adopted Regional Transportation Plan. These are areas within the NYMTC planning area, where land development and transportation investment planning are to be coordinated to achieve environmental sustainability, local economic revitalization, and improved quality of life. Her role is to research methods to establish the influence of NYMTC’s regional transportation plans on municipal land use planning decisions. Conversely, she will also research methods to help NYMTC ensure that municipal planning efforts are incorporated into the regional planning perspective.

Ms. Shirin Najafabadi has received her M.S. in Transportation Planning on May 2014 from the State University of New York at Albany, and has been admitted to the CCNY Ph.D. program through an extremely competitive selection process. Ms. Najafabadi’s record in transportation planning, modeling and analysis has been outstanding. Her research involves the application of mathematical optimization, machine learning and statistics to transportation problems.