Professor Simon Washington

Professor Washington has taught a variety of university level units as well as professional development courses since 1995 at a number of different universities, including UC Berkeley, the University of Sydney, Arizona State University, University of Arizona, Ajou University, and Georgia Tech. The following unit descriptions highlight the content from Professor Washington's teaching portfolio.
Civil Engineering Professional PracticeUnit for Civil Engineering undergraduate students. Unit covers topics in engineering economics, professionalism, and communication skills development. Introduced new topics such as conflict resolution, negotiation skills, memory improvement, and importance of mentoring.
Sustainable Transport SystemsThis unit serves as an undergraduate elective or graduate unit. The unit examines from a system-level perspective the major externalities of the transportation network after first reviewing the transportation planning process. It addresses air quality, noise, economics, health, water quality, congestion, and the social impacts.
Urban Transportation SafetyThis unit serves as an undergraduate elective or graduate unit, and broadens aspects of transportation safety to include roadway engineering principles and concepts concerned with roadway safety. It also covers in depth human factors issues, accident reconstruction, and state of the art crash analysis methods.
Research and Statistical Methods for Civil EngineersThis unit is designed to provide a solid theoretical foundation of a broad range of statistical methods used in Civil Engineering and Transport applications, with a focus on statistical modeling. Methods covered include probability and statistics fundamentals review, linear regression, survival models, count data models, discrete choice models, time series models, Bayesian models, and others.
Human Factors and Safety Analysis in TransportationThis graduate level unit introduces important concepts underlying human factors and transportation safety analysis.  The types of analyses include identification of factors contributing to accident occurrence and the evaluation of safety investments.  Concepts covered include: definitions of risk, exposure, and system safety; driver factors, roadway factors, and vehicle factors; accident accounting and reporting; prediction and estimation of accident occurrence (including modeling techniques--Poisson and Negative Binomial regression, Bayesian Estimation, Survival and Time Series Analysis, and other techniques.), and psychological aspects of driver behavior.
Survey Design and AnalysisThis unit focuses on the fundamentals in the design of survey instruments: mail out mail back, telephone, and personal interviews. It then covers the topics of basic sampling methods and design.  The last half of the course develops statistical modeling tools: discrete choice models, covering models of binary and multi-nomial choice including linear probability model, and logit, probit, and nested logit models, and structural equation models.
Urban Transportation PlanningThis graduate level unit covers the many aspects of transportation planning, including policy, basic traffic principles, history of transportation, transportation control measures, and advanced transportation technologies.  The course and laboratories have been significantly revised by Simon Washington, Randall Guensler, and Larry Frank.Probability and Statistics for EngineersThis unit covers basic concepts in graphical and numerical methods of central tendency and spread, counting, probability, distributions, and hypothesis testing.