Dissemination of Research
Short Course to Transportation Professionals
Faculty from the MATC consortium universities have conducted numerous short courses across the region over the last five years. Topics have included roadside safety training classes for design engineers, specialty roadside safety workshops, geometric design classes related to updates to Green Book and traffic control, to name a few. All of these courses are fairly extensive. For example, every year for the past five years UNL faculty have taught roadside safety design classes to state highway designers from across the region. Each class involved between 8 and 16 hours of instruction and typically included 60 state highway designers. MATC has developed a number of short courses that are offered on a yearly basis to state highway engineers. These courses are typically between 8 and 12 hours of instruction. KSU offers six 4-5 day Superpave Training programs annually to the engineers and technicians of the states in Region 7. KSU, in cooperation with KU, offer several safety-related classes under Traffic Assistance for Safety in Kansas (TASK) program. KSU will make some of these classes available online. KSU has been housing Annual Kansas Transpiration Engineering Conference for about 83 years.
Workshops for State and Federal Transportation Officials
UNL faculty have organized national workshops on emerging roadside safety issues each of the last three years. Each of these workshops attracted approximately 80 roadside safety experts from around the nation to address important safety issues and formulate research problem statements to solve these issues. Many of these problem statements subsequently have been funded by the Midwest States Pooled Fund Program while others have been selected for funding by NCHRP.
Peer Reviewed Publication
The transportation faculty of the MATC consortium are regular contributors to peer-reviewed professional journals including the ASCE Journal of Transportation Engineering, Accident Analysis and Prevention, Journal of Transportation Statistics and Transportation Research Record, among others.
Regional and National Presentation
Faculty members from MATC consortium universities regularly give presentations describing research findings at conferences and workshops across the nation including the Annual Meeting of the Transportation Research Board (TRB). These presentations at regional and national conferences, technical meetings and conferences number more than 100 per year.
Presentations to K-12 Students
Over the last 10 years, MATC consortium members have also taken an active role in secondary educational programs, including Bright Lights and MESA.
These programs involve bringing junior and senior high school students to consortium member campuses and demonstrating the importance of science and engineering careers, especially those related to transportation.
Technical Assistance to Transportation Professionals
UNL faculty members of the MwRSF provide specialty safety advice to the eleven states in the Midwest States Pooled
Fund Program. Under this program, any highway designer who encounters a particularly difficult safety problem is encouraged to contact UNL faculty for technical advice . The faculty then identify the most cost beneficial solution for each of these "special" problems. Each problem and the recommended solution are then summarized in quarterly reports sent to the Design Standards Engineer in each pooled fund state.
Other Methods of Research Dissemination
UNL and other MATC consortium universities employ a comprehensive process to disseminate transportation research results in a variety of formats, including news releases and public service announcements highlighting transportation faculty members' research successes and accomplishments both in print and electronic formats. Some of these stories have been highlighted in print and broadcast media.
