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Dr. Kakan Dey is an Assistant Professor at the Wadsworth Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, West Virginia University, WV, USA. He completed his Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from Clemson University in 2014 and M.Sc. in Civil Engineering from Wayne State University in 2010. Dr. Dey was the recipient of the Clemson University 2016 Distinguished Postdoctoral Award. His primary research area includes intelligent transportation systems, and traffic safety and operations. He has been very active in engineering education research as well.

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Md Tawhidur Rahman is pursuing PhD in Civil Engineering at West Virginia University. He has completed his Masters in Civil Engineering from the same university in 2018. Mr. Rahman has been awarded CEE PhD fellowship cap for the academic year of 2019-2020 for his research contribution in the field of transportation engineering. Research interest of Mr. Rahman include winter roadway maintenance, shared-use mobility, social-media data analysis, traffic operation at intersection, and connected and autonomous vehicle.

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Dr. Pyrialakou is an Assistant Professor at the Wadsworth Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at West Virginia University. She received her Diploma in Civil Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, in 2011 and in 2016 she earned a Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from Purdue University. Dr. Pyrialakou’s expertise and interests involve the use of statistical, econometric, spatial, and economic analysis tools in the broader research area of transportation planning and evaluation of transportation systems. She started working in the area of engineering education at Purdue University when she taught Introduction to Transportation Engineering in spring 2016. She currently explores topics related to undergraduate STEM education improvement, including holistic engineering; connecting teaching, research, and practice; student retention in engineering; and recruitment and retention of underrepresented students in engineering. Dr. Pyrialakou also teaches courses on transportation engineering, transportation/urban planning, and civil engineering/transportation data analysis.

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Professor of Civil Engineering at West Virginia University.

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Karen E. Rambo-Hernandez is an associate professor at Texas A&M University in the College of Education and Human Development in the department of Teaching, Learning, and Culture. In her research, she is interested in the assessing STEM interventions on student outcomes, measuring academic growth, and evaluating the impact of curricular change.

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Dr. Fraustino is an assistant professor of strategic communication and director of the Public Interest Communication Research Laboratory in the Media Innovation Center of the Reed College of Media at West Virginia University. She is a research affiliate in the risk communication and resilience portfolio at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), a DHS Emeritus Center of Excellence. She specializes in crisis, emergency, and risk communication science. Dr. Fraustino’s work has been recognized with top research paper awards at national/international conferences yearly from 2013-present. Additionally, she was named a national 2017-2018 AEJMC Emerging Scholar, earned the 2018 Doug Newsom Award for Research in Global Ethics and Diversity from the AEJMC PR Division, was the 2017 Reed College of Media Faculty Research Award recipient, was a 2016 national Frank Public Interest Communications Research Prize award winner, received a 2015 Most Promising Professor Award from the AEJMC Mass Communication and Society Division, and was selected as a 2014-2015 START Terrorism Research Award Fellow. She earned a Ph.D. from the University of Maryland, where she was graduate fellow and the 2015 Department of Communication's Most Outstanding Doctoral Student.

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John Deskins serves as Assistant Dean for Outreach and Engagement, Director of the Bureau of Business & Economic Research, and as Associate Professor of Economics in the College of Business & Economics at West Virginia University. He leads the Bureau’s efforts to serve the state by providing rigorous economic analysis and macroeconomic forecasting to business leaders and policymakers across the state. He received his PhD in Economics from the University of Tennessee.

Deskins’ academic research has focused on economic development, small business economics, and government tax and expenditure policy, primarily at the US state level. His work has appeared in outlets such as Contemporary Economic Policy, Public Finance Review, Economic Development Quarterly, Small Business Economics, Public Budgeting and Finance, Regional Studies, Annals of Regional Science, Tax Notes, and State Tax Notes, as well as in books published by Cambridge University Press and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Deskins has testified before the United States Senate, the United States House of Representatives, and the West Virginia Legislature. He has delivered more than 100 speeches to business, government, and community groups and his quotes have appeared in numerous media outlets such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Bloomberg, CNBC, National Public Radio, and PBS. He has served as principal investigator or co-principal investigator on more than $2 million in funded research.

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L. Christopher Plein is an Eberly Family Professor for Outstanding Public Service and Professor of Public Administration at West Virginia University. He is especially interested in the interface of engineering, science, and technology with matters of public affairs and governance.

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Abhik Roy is a professor educational psychology in the Department of Learning Sciences & Human Development (https://lshd.wvu.edu/) within the College of Education & Human Services at West Virginia University. Dr. Roy holds a Ph.D. in Program Evaluation with expertise in data science, visualization, and social network analysis and is an evaluator on multiple federal grants spanning both the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. He currently conducts research in (a) the use of machine learning to evaluate programs, (b) using predictive networks to assess change, and (c) deep learning architectures for text classification.

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