UCD PhD student wins ‘Best Student Paper Award’ at North American Regional Science Congress
Thursday, 22 November, 2007
North American Regional Science Council (NARSC)
Amaya Vega, a PhD student in the UCD School of Economics recently won the prestigious Best Student Paper Award at the North American Regional Science Congress (
http://www.narsc.org/). Amaya’s paper, which is drawn from her PhD thesis, is entitled “Residential Location and Travel-to-Work Mode Choices under Central and Suburban Employment Destination Patterns”.
Focusing on developing a framework for analysing mode choice in travel to work decisions in the Greater Dublin Area (GDA), the paper shows that the congestion charge has a greater impact on residential relocation decisions than on mode switching behaviour.
“Competition for the Best Student Paper Award was very strong this year. Amaya’s success in this competition is a strong endorsement of the high quality of the research that she has undertaken during the last four years at UCD”, said Dr Aisling Reynolds-Feighan of the UCD School of Economics.
Funding to attend the Congress was provided by the UCD Seed Funding Scheme administered by UCD Research. The Seed Funding Scheme gives staff and students an opportunity to present high quality research at key international conferences. “The fact that it is open to doctoral students is a particularly strong feature of the scheme as it facilitates researchers like Amaya Vega presenting research papers at leading international conferences”, added Dr Reynolds-Feighan.
A Spanish national, Amaya has recently taken up a lecturing post in the Department of Economics at NUIG for the 2007/08 academic year.
The North American Regional Science Council NARSC (
http://www.narsc.org/) is an international scholarly organisation that focuses on regional analysis. It is one of the three continent-wide associations of the Regional Science Association International (
http://www.regionalscience.org/).
