Sarah Grajdura is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Vermont. Dr. Grajdura’s research interests include human mobility and behavior in natural disasters, transportation equity and justice, and unmet travel needs. Her research takes an interdisciplinary and human-focused approach to engineering problems, combining mixed methods (qualitative and quantitative) approaches characteristic of the social sciences with engineering methods like transportation simulation and travel behavior modeling. Dr. Grajdura has also used agent-based modeling, travel demand modeling, transportation health impact modeling, and econometric modeling to explore different aspects of sustainable transportation.

She is motivated by her interest in working towards a more resilient and inclusive future built environment, by using research methods inclusive of populations which have been historically excluded or misrepresented in transportation research and design. At UVM, her work includes community-based research on the unmet travel needs of rural carless populations including migrant farmworkers, disaster resilience of rural communities, and developing better transportation accessibility metrics.

Before joining UVM, Sarah was a postdoc at the University of California Davis Institute of Transportation Studies-Energy Futures Research Program. She has also worked in pipeline integrity engineering and environmental site assessment. Sarah holds a B.S. in Civil and Environmental Engineering and M.S. in Applied Economics, both from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Grajdura completed her Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering at University of California, Davis, with an emphasis in transportation engineering, economics, and statistics.