Tierra Bills
Biography
Dr. Tierra Bills is a former Michigan Society Fellow and Assistant Professor, at the University of Michigan. She also worked as a Research Scientist at IBM Research Africa, from 2013 – 2016. Much of Dr. Bills’ current research focuses on investigating the social impacts of transportation projects. She uses an activity-based travel-demand modeling approach to investigate individual and household-level transportation-equity effects, for the purpose of designing transportation systems that will provide more equitable returns to society. Her other areas of interest include public transit, transit reliability, and emerging data sources for travel demand modeling.
Education
Ph.D. 2013, University of California, Berkeley (Civil and Environmental Engineering)
M.S. 2009, University of California, Berkeley (Civil and Environmental Engineering)
B.S 2008, Florida A&M University (Civil Engineering Technology)
Courses Taught
CE 4850 Engineering Economy Fall 2019
Research Interests
- Travel Behavior Modeling
- Transportation Equity
- Transportation Economics
- Emerging Data for Travel Modeling
- Public Transportation
Publications
- Bills, Tierra, and Joan Walker (2017). Looking beyond the mean for equity analysis: Examining distributional impacts of transportation improvements. Transport Policy, 54, 61-69.
- Santani, D., Njuguna, J., Bills, T., Bryant, A. W., Bryant, R., Ledgard, J., & Gatica-Perez, D. (2015). Communisense: Crowdsourcing road hazards in Nairobi. In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (pp. 445-456). ACM.
- Bills, T., Bryant, R., & Bryant, A. W. (2014). Towards a frugal framework for monitoring road quality. In 17th International IEEE Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC) (pp. 3022-3027). IEEE.
- Bills, Tierra, Elizabeth Sall, and Joan Walker (2012). Activity-based Travel Demand Models and Transportation Equity Analysis: Research Directions and An Exploration of Model Performance. In Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board.
Patents
- Bills, T., Bryant, R., Tatsubori, M., & Walcott, A. (2018). "Method of quickly detecting road distress."U.S. Patent Application No. 10/109,191.
- Bills, T., Branch, J., Bryant, R., Kaguma, D., Tatsubori, M., Walcott, A., & Wamburu, J. M. (2017). "System and method for vehicle assisted response to road conditions." U.S. Patent No. 9,840,252.