Presenter

Rachael Thompson Panik, AICP, is a PhD student at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. She’s originally from northeast Alabama, but now lives in Atlanta’s Old Fourth Ward neighborhood. Rachael holds a degree in civil engineering from the University of Alabama at Birmingham and a master’s in city and regional planning from Clemson University. Before pursuing her PhD, she worked as a consultant to design and plan safe infrastructure for cyclists and pedestrians. Now as a PhD student, Rachael’s various areas of research share the common thread of safety in the context of complex systems. While at Georgia Tech, she’s researched travel behavior during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, system safety in engineering education, and bicycle crash reporting inconsistencies. Her dissertation research centers on the exposure-risk relationship for cyclists and pedestrians in Georgia. In partnership with the Georgia Department of Transportation, her research will implement new approaches to estimating bicycle and pedestrian activity and risk, using data from crowd-sourced data, traffic signal data, and other sources.