Tingting Zhang

Supervisor: Dr Divya Nair, Prof Vinayak Dixit

Areas of Interest:

• Transportation resilience
• Transport economics,
• Equity in transportation

I am particularly interested in optimizing the resilience tactics in the transport system development from an economic perspective and understanding the equity in the transport resilience improvement.

In a situation where natural or man-made catastrophes occur frequently, resilience improvement becomes one of the most critical problems for transport system development. So, resilient transport system investment should be carried out, especially from an economic perspective which could provide a more intuitive and effective way to optimize investment behaviours. My research focuses on this problem to help decision makers optimise the investment tactics under budgetary constraints and equity considerations. I believe transportation resilience improvement can effectively reduce economic losses caused by disasters and improve people’s happiness and convenience.

The Research Centre for Integrated Transport Innovation (rCITI) at UNSW is a world-class research institution in the field of transportation, and I am honoured to study transportation here.

I would like to share the best piece of advice I have ever been given and also the greatest lesson in my research: When doing something, the direction is much more important than the speed, since Fast is Slow and Slow is Fast in most instances. When we take a shortcut in order to complete something quickly, we may save some time now, but in the longer-term future, such behaviour will reduce the speed at which we develop a certain ability.