Howard Family Speaker
The Howard family established this series through the MSSM Foundation in order to bring distinguished academics, professionals, and practitioners to MSSM and share with the community their passion and area of expertise.
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Preview: This talk will explore how the integration of modern algorithms and behavioral economics is transforming transportation decision-making, offering a powerful alternative to the traditional four-step demand planning model. While the conventional approach—trip generation, distribution, mode choice, and route assignment—assumes rational decision-making and relies on aggregate data, it often fails to capture the nuanced realities of individual travel behavior. Today’s transportation systems generate vast amounts of data, which are analyzed to optimize traffic and predict demand. However, these tools alone may overlook the influence of human biases, habits, and social norms. Behavioral economics fills this gap by better accounting for observed behavior and social dynamics. By combining algorithmic precision with behavioral insight, this new approach enables more accurate, inclusive, and effective transportation planning. These learnings can directly shape smarter investments in infrastructure, inform demand-responsive transit systems, ensure policies that promote more sustainable and equitable travel choices, and help design targeted incentives for modal shifts.
Bio: Robyn Marquis is the Senior Director of Innovative Mobility at CALSTART. She oversees a portfolio of personal mobility, school mobility, and last-mile delivery. She works closely with public agencies, solution providers, and other key stakeholders to advance more equitable mobility options and reduce climate impacts. Robyn previously served as the Program Lead for the New York Clean Transportation Prizes, an $85 million initiative to improve mobility and accelerate electrification in underserved communities. Robyn earned her doctorate in Transportation Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, NY.
Preview: Earth’s glaciers have left geological imprints on landscapes around the world that can be used to decipher the climate mechanisms that produced ice ages and their rapid terminations. I will share a new view of what caused ice-age climate change based on our ongoing effort to chart the history of glaciers in mountain chains around the world during and since the last ice age. Finally, I will discuss how ice-age climate dynamics derived from this effort may apply to today’s warming world.
Bio: An associate professor at the University of Maine, Dr. Putnam studies the geologic record of Earth’s mountain glaciers and ice sheets to gain insights into the dynamics governing global changes. Since participating in a scientific cruise to study the dynamics of Arctic sea ice in high school, Putnam has logged over 200 weeks conducting field-work in remote glacial environments, such as in Antarctic, New Zealand, the Andes, and the mountain chains of High Asia. His research focuses on charting the demise of Earth’s terrestrial ice masses of the last ice age, with an aim toward identifying the climatic mechanisms that drove massive changes in the global energy budget. An overall goal of his is to improve knowledge of climate dynamics and ice melt in a warming world.
Preview: The Universe is a mystery. It is also a generous source of data and revelation. I will show how we take observations of the night sky and decode them to learn about the nature of matter, energy, space and time. Unlike other sciences, we can not do experiments on the Universe, we are forced to watch it and to accept only the signals it gives us. I will talk about how we overcome this ultimate forensic endeavour, while also overcoming our own biases.
Bio: Professor Tom Giblin, PhD is a 1999 graduate of the Maine School of Science and Mathematics who later received his PhD from Yale University. He is a professor of Physics at Kenyon College with research appointments at Case Western Reserve University and The Ohio State University. An expert in theoretical and numerical high energy physics and cosmology, Giblin employs high-performance computing to study the physics of the early universe, prioritizing undergraduate involvement in his work.