JiYoung Park Receives UB Exceptional Scholar Award

JiYoung Park, PhD, assistant professor of urban and regional planning, has received one of three  2013 UB Young Investigator Awards. The Young Investigator Award is a University at Buffalo tradition established in 2002. This Exceptional Scholar Award celebrates a recent superior achievement of a scholar in his/her field of study that distinguishes the recipient as an up-and-coming scholar. Such an achievement will have earned the individual acclaim for his/her work, which could be a published work or other scholastic or artistic endeavor.

The award will be presented to Park at UB's 2013 Celebration of Academic Excellence for faculty and staff: Wednesday, October 9, 2013, 3:30 p.m., Slee Hall (UB's North Campus).

Park researches urban economics and transportation modeling applied to natural and man-made environmental and security problems. He developed National Interstate Economic Model (NIEMO), used to analyze economic impacts resulting from natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and hypothetical terrorist attacks. NIEMO is further expanding to (1) transportation and multi-modal systems, (2) international countries, (3) temporal extension, (4) demand price elasticity model, (5) HAZUS software, (6) game theory and (7) environmental model estimating Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emission effects.

Robert Shibley, dean of the School of Architecture and Planning, says Park is a pioneer in the application of regional economic analysis, with promise as a revolutionary in his field: "Dr. Park has an extraordinary record of publication, attaining national and international prominence. He is already comparable in his achievements to some of the field's leading scholars.”

Adds Ernest Sternberg, chair of the Department of Urban and Regional Planning:  “Professor Park has been developing amazing analytical methods for examining the effects of sudden events on regional and national economies. This could be a good event like the opening of a new business enterprise or a bad one like a hurricane.  For a relatively recent faculty member, he has already made a reputation for himself as a global leader in such regional analysis.  We are very proud that he is a member of our department and our university.”

Park is also an active member of the international and local Regional Science associations, the North American Regional Science Council, the Western Regional Science Association, and the international Society for Risk Analysis. He is currently Councilor after the President of the Upstate New York (UNY) Chapter of Society for Risk Analysis. In this role, he helps discern how the UNY chapter can combine academic and professional groups in the society. Park also serves as Extreme Events Faculty Advisory Committee for UB's Multidisciplinary Center for Earthquake Engineering Research (MCEER). He is a national member of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP), where he proposes how the risk modeling can be applied to the planning field.

Park currently teaches three graduate courses: Research Methods, Economic Concepts, and Quantitative Methods. He also was appointed as part of UB2020's Extreme Events Strategic Strength.