During my time as a Roepke Scholar with Dr. Julie Cidell’s Society, Mobility and Infrastructure at Illinois (SMIIL) Lab, I worked on the Freight (de)Centralization project, which is a follow-up to a groundbreaking study she conducted showing that freight and logistics activity were decentralizing in most U.S. metropolitan areas and away from city centers.
I used a variety of geographic and research techniques on this project. Collecting and aggregating the data took a lot of time and required meticulous work to comb through, clean, and select the county data for all 51 metropolitan areas that we looked at from the years 2005 and 2020.
To understand how the concentration of warehouses differed from each of the metropolitan areas, we calculated a Gini-index (coefficient) for each area based on the distribution of warehouses across the area’s counties. This allowed us to quantify how the distribution of logistics centers changed from 2005 to 2020 and compare it with the prior trend. I could then also map the data using GIS software and properly classify it to ensure it was properly visualized, which allowed us to find spatial trends in the data like a coastal-versus-heartland pattern that appeared to be emerging.
Working on this Roepke Research project with Dr. Cidell was a great opportunity to apply skills I learned in my undergraduate coursework. Since graduating from UIUC, I have begun working in the Emergency Management field which has a large logistics component. And I’m proud to share that I recently received the Illinois Emergency Services Management Association’s (IESMA) Student of the Year Award!