Hough nominated to TOPS committee

Jill Hough, program director for the Small Urban & Rural Transit Center with the Upper Great Plains Transportation Institute at North Dakota State University, has been selected to serve on the oversight and project selection committee of the Transit Cooperative Research Program (TCRP).

TCRP, authorized in 1991, is a research program designed to focus on the needs of transit operating agencies. It is sponsored by the Federal Transit Administration and carried out under an agreement among the National Academies of Science acting through the Transportation Research Board, the Transit Development Corporation, the educational and research arm of the American Public Transit Association, and the FTA. As a member of the TCRP Oversight and Project Selection (TOPS) Committee, Hough will be involved in setting the research agenda for TCRP. The TOPS committee, composed of transit system managers, university representatives, suppliers and the FTA, selects projects from research topics submitted by the transit industry or developed to meet special research needs. Research topics come from a wide variety of areas including operations, services, engineering of facilities and equipment, maintenance, human resources, administration, and policy and planning.

Hough has 12 years of experience in transportation research. She serves as director of UGPTI's Small Urban & Rural Transit Center, which focuses on research, education and training for the public transportation industry. She has published reports and articles in the areas of low-volume roads, logistics and economic development and has worked on several projects with the U.S. Department of Transportation. She spent four months as interim director for the Federal Transit Administration's Transit Intelligent Vehicle Initiative in Washington, D.C.

Hough received B.S. and M.S. degrees in agricultural economics at NDSU and is currently working on her Ph.D. in transportation technology and policy from the University of California-Davis.