Current Students and Staff

Two PhD students from Loughborough University were recently announced as the winner and runner-up of the UK academic community’s Smeed Prize.

Fredrik Monsuur and Nicolette Formosa from the Transport and Planning Group in the School of Architecture, Building and Civil Engineering achieved first and second places in the Smeed Prize for best student paper and presentation at the 51^st Universities' Transport Study Group (UTSG) annual conference in Leeds, which took place from 8-10 July.

The Smeed Prize takes into account the sophistication and complexity of the work submitted, the quality of the conference talk and the student's performance in answering questions. 

Fredrik 's winning paper was entitled "Quantifying the impact of train delays on passenger satisfaction" (supervised by Professor Marcus Enoch and Professor Mohammed Quddus), and Nicolette’s paper was entitled “Vehicle-level conflict detection using deep learning” (supervised by Professor Mohammed Quddus and Dr Andrew Timmis).

They competed alongside seven other shortlisted papers and the judges commended the high standard of entries received.

This year’s UTSG conference featured a total of 83 research papers in the fields of transport, travel and mobility and was attended by a number of delegates.

Loughborough's team comprised of three academics (Professor Marcus Enoch, Dr Andrew Timmis and Dr Craig Morton) and three researchers (Fredrik Monsuur, Nicolette Formosa and Grace Crowley), who between them presented two papers and three presentations covering the topics of visualisation, data mining, artificial intelligence, rail, and aviation.

Of the award, Fredrik said: “I am delighted to be awarded the Smeed Prize. It was a wonderful experience to attend the conference and to share and discuss my work with colleagues from other universities.”

Nicolette added: "I am deeply honoured to receive this award. To be recognised for my work on something as important as traffic safety is very special. Coming runner-up in such a challenging competition where entry is only allowed once in a lifetime makes this award even more incredibly rewarding!”