2018-2020

My roles: I was the project manager, working for the lead investigator of this community-engaged research project, which I was involved with from early 2018 to its completion in September 2020. Commissioned by the City of Vancouver, this was a complex project in that it involved multiple partners from different sectors (hotel management reps for seven large downtown hotels, the union representing the workers at those hotels, and TransLink), as well as multiple data sources and research methods (interviews with hotel management and workers, three rounds of paper surveys at each of seven hotels, and TransLink data). It was also an extremely interesting project in that it investigated the effect that varying levels of experimental transit subsidies had on hotel workers’ use of transit for commuting. The work I did for this project was varied, including the following:

• providing input on survey and research design
• assisting with recruitment of research assistants
• developing training materials for research assistants
• scheduling, coordinating and supervising research assistants (as they conducted in-person surveys, cleaned and entered data)
• purchasing and delivering supplies to survey teams, and ensuring surveys were stored securely and according to ethics and confidentiality requirements
• conducting in-person surveys and interviews with hotel workers and management
• liaising and meeting with research partners
• general admin tasks such as calendar management, meeting coordination and expense tracking
• communicating with research participants
• contributing to the drafting, editing and proofreading of the interim and final reports
• identifying, contracting and liaising with an editor and a graphic designer for the production and layout of the final report
• drafting the news release that announced the study results
• Contributing to and giving presentations on the study
• Initiating and coordinating a public webinar to share the results of the study

As well as the final report, this study has so far generated two academic publications, in which my contributions to the study were acknowledged with authorship credits.

• 2021 | “Employer-paid transit subsidies and travel behaviour: Experimental evidence from Vancouver hotels,” Journal of Urban Mobility
• 2021 | “The quality of life effects of enhancing public transport subsidies for hospitality workers in Vancouver, British Columbia” in Transport in Human Scale Cities: NECTAR Series on Transportation and Communications Networks Research