pacific nw transportation consortium region 10 Pactrans

UW STAR Lab undergraduate student researcher, Peter Yu, was recently among five UW students to have been honored as Goldwater Scholars by the Goldwater Foundation. This marks the first time five students from the UW were named in a single year.

The Goldwater Foundation awards undergraduate scholarships to students who show exceptional academic promise pursuing research careers in the natural sciences, mathematics and engineering. The five UW nominees were selected from a pool of 5,000 students nominated by 427 institutions across the country. A total of 413 scholars were announced from the 2023 competition, bringing the number of scholarships awarded by the Goldwater Foundation since 1989 to 10,283.

Yu is a junior majoring in civil and environmental engineering with a focus on transportation engineering. He is passionate about highway transportation engineering, with interests in highway design, traffic operations and simulation, traffic signal control and intelligent transportation systems. Since his freshman year, he has been a member of the Smart Transportation Applications and Research Laboratory led by Professor Yinhai Wang. In the lab, he has developed and tested novel highway geometric designs, traffic control schemes, and intelligent transportation systems to increase safety and mobility for all roadway users.

Yu has developed several new alternative intersection/interchange and freeway designs and novel traffic control schemes for them. He has been analyzing their safety and operational performance with traffic microsimulation. Yu aims to obtain a Ph.D. in civil engineering and make meaningful contributions to the transportation engineering field globally through research and innovation.