It is my pleasure to welcome the initial Zephyr Board of Directors to their roles. As the board, they will be in charge of overall strategy and project initiation and oversight.
Board Members
Board Chair: Clint Daniels, SANDAG in San Diego
- Leader of the San Diego regional transportation and land use modeling team
- Former geographic software entrepreneur
- Enjoys craft beer, baseball, and data standards
Thomas Adler, RSG in White River Junction
- Founder and President of RSG Inc.
- Former Dartmouth professor
- Interests span policy to modeling applications
Hani Mahmassani, Northwestern University
- Distinguished professor specializing in dynamic, multi-modal network analysis, and logistics and founding chair of the TRB Network Modeling Committee (ADB30)
- Interested in legitimizing the field of travel analysis and closing the gap between academia and practice
- Avid skiier
Eric Miller, University of Toronto
- Former rocket scientist specializing in bringing innovative integrated urban modeling to practice
- Self-identified “engineer” who makes the science useful
- Excited about standardization and science
Rosella Picado, WSP in Seattle
- Travel demand modeling consultant
- Has developed and applied activity-based and trip-based models
- From Costa Rica
Mario Scott, SDG in New York
- Transit modeling consultant
- Interested in having models and big data play a more useful role in decision-making
- Knows how to knit
Leah Silen, NumFocus in Austin
- Leader of a software foundation that supports numerous software and professional development projects for open-source scientific computing
- Public outreach and communications professional
- Interested in assisting us get off the ground and avoid unnecessary stumbles
Selection Process
This combination of talented individuals reflects a diversity of interests, industries, and backgrounds, which Zephyr needs in order to be effective and relevant. We really appreciated the Founding Stakeholders’ guidance and assistance in finding and attracting these individuals to these non trivial volunteer duties. The founding stakeholders, as the initial Zephyr membership voted up/down on the entirety of the board slate.
Note that in future election processes, roughly a quarter of the board will be elected in any single year so that we can retain institutional knowledge.