Suzanne Childress

• Defined requirements for and delivered Travel Model Two (TM2), a large multi-component regional activity-based model supporting Plan Bay Area 2050.
• Transitioned consultant-developed system into a documented, maintainable in-house product using Python, R, SQL, and version control.
• Advised executive leadership on model readiness, analytical uncertainty, and responsible use of complex model outputs in public-facing planning documents.

• Argued for, built, and led a five-person data science team from scratch; supported applied research, survey programs, equity analysis, and policy analytics.
• Provided analytical management for a $2M+ household travel survey program end-to-end (jointly with Brian Lee): address-based sampling design, confidentiality protocols, and public microdata dissemination.
• My team built and published psrccensus, an open-source R package enabling planners to access ACS, Decennial, and PUMS datasets independently.
• Equity research: analyzed transit use disparities for Hispanic households and systematic undercounting of women's caretaking trips; translated findings into investment and data collection recommendations.
• Led team design and delivery of agency-wide data warehouse; established shared code libraries and reproducible workflows.
• Developed Puget Sound Trends, a public analytics platform integrating demographic, equity, and transportation data.
• Presented COVID-era impacts on work patterns, VMT, and travel behavior to the regional Transportation Demand Management committee; view presentation.

• Managed the team developing and applying SoundCast, the region's activity-based travel model; outputs directly defined transit route alignments and stop placements.
• Provided analysis directly informing Washington State road user charge legislation for a 4-million-person region.
• Developed novel evaluation frameworks for autonomous vehicle scenarios; investigated cases where competing models produced divergent forecasts.

• Directed FTA New Starts project, upgrading activity-based model to meet federal standards for transit project evaluation and grant eligibility.
• Led applied analytics for Metro Vision long-range planning cycles (2008, 2012) and Vision 2040.
• Estimated and validated nested and multinomial logit models for mode choice, destination choice, and time-of-day.

• Travel demand modeling for Alternatives Analysis and Environmental Assessment projects.
• Validated and updated regional transportation models; authored technical documentation for environmental review.

• Systems performance and decision-making under uncertainty research in industrial engineering.
• Co-authored peer-reviewed publication on parallel machine replacement under stochastic deterioration (Naval Research Logistics, 2005).

Focus: Transportation Systems, Survey Sampling, Stochastic Processes, Statistics

• Co-organized and facilitated AI Tools for Travel Analytics at the 2025 Modeling Mobility Conference; led practitioner discussion on benefits, failure modes, institutional barriers, and societal downsides of LLM-assisted coding in applied analytics.
• Advised a University of San Francisco fellowship team on classification metrics and evaluation design for comparing LLM outputs to expert judgment on household survey free-response data.