In response to the varied perspectives required to understand transportation problems, transportation research has evolved into an interdisciplinary field. Most transportation scholars now draw on material and methodologies from outside their own discipline, and all transportation journals have become multidisciplinary. However the formal structure of graduate education has lagged behind scholarly practice. UC Irvine is one of the very few graduate programs that actually offers the relevant training for doing modern transportation research.
Students acquire a foundation of general, multidisciplinary knowledge in the core courses.
They acquire practice in research skills in the colloquium, and in the Replication Project. And they acquire depth of knowledge in some specific area by completing a subset of the specialized area courses. We expect our students to graduate with a firm command of statistical methodology, and of the basic theory in the core areas. Through their research projects and dissertation, they will have acquired competence in research design and execution, sophistication in model-building, and superior skills in some specialized area. Most importantly, our graduates will be able to creatively apply these skills to problems at the frontiers of current research in transportation studies.