James E. Moore, II has been elected to a three-year term on the California Transportation Foundation (CTF) Board of the Directors, effective immediately. Moore is the first academic to serve on the CTF Board and the first ever nominated to do so.

“This is a substantial vote of confidence in USC’s relationship with the transportation engineering and planning professions,” said Moore. “Being invited into this role ahead of personnel from California’s other leading transportation research and teaching universities indicates USC has a reputation as an institution that actively cultivates its understanding of the professions and industries our students enter.”

James E. Moore II

Moore is a professor in the Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering and the Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and serves as faculty director of the Astani Department’s Transportation Engineering Program. He also holds a secondary appointment in the USC School of Policy, Planning, and Development, and is one of the founding executive committee members of the National Center for Metropolitan Transportation Research (METRANS), a joint USC, California State University at Long Beach research center sponsored by the U.S. and California Departments of Transportation.

Since its founding as a non-profit public benefit corporation in California in 1988, CTF has developed programs in response to the needs of California's transportation agencies and the field of transportation, including student scholarships, employee emergency assistance, worker memorials, event and conference support to groups and individuals, and awards and recognition within the field. The original mission for the organization’s creation remains its most fundamental – serving as a fiscal entity to collect and disburse worker assistance and memorial funds, a function the California Department of Transportation is prohibited by statute from performing.

When a member of California’s transportation community faces disaster losses, medical emergencies or death, CTF offers an audited mechanism to collect the outpouring of financial support sent by friends, colleagues and family. When sufficient funds have been collected, CTF disburses them, adding some from its own resources, in accordance with the wishes of those directing the fund. These grants have paid for medical bills, costs of recovery from disasters, memorial scholarships, funeral expenses, college costs for survivors' children, and more.

The foundation’s annual Transportation Education Symposium brings together high-level transportation professionals from California agencies and firms with the best and brightest transportation students from California universities, including USC.  The students participate in a unique, team-based competition in which they formulate a professional response to a mock request for proposals relating to a transportation engineering project. Juniors and seniors in civil engineering and urban planning are eligible to participate, subject to nomination by their respective institutions.

Members of the USC Viterbi School and the School of Policy, Planning, and Development faculties collaborate to select three students each year, several of whom have participated on winning teams and/or received CTF scholarships. METRANS pays for USC and CSULB student travel to the meeting site, and Moore personally covers an extra day of lodging to permit USC students to travel the day before the symposium begins. Student participants consistently report the symposium is an extraordinary experience at which they find the professional direction they will use throughout their careers.