Jennifer Dill, professor of urban studies and planning at Portland State University and director of TREC and the NITC program, has been awarded the 2015 Dale Prize from California State Polytechnic University, Pomona.

She will spend Wednesday and Thursday at Cal Poly this week, attending a colloquium with students, educators and planning professionals and a formal banquet to receive the award.

The Dale Prize is an annual event organized by the department of urban and regional planning at Cal Poly Pomona. They recognize planning excellence with a pair of prizes each year: a $5,000 award to a scholar and a $5,000 award to a practitioner. Dill is receiving the scholar prize for 2015, and the practitioner prize goes to Fred Dock, director of transportation for the City of Pasadena, who is also a nationally recognized leader in multimodal transportation analysis and walking accessibility.

The department focuses on a different planning theme each year. This year’s theme is Streets for Everyone: Advancing Active Transportation.

Dill’s research into active transportation accessibility and mode share has made national headlines, most recently as part of the Green Lanes project, a NITC-sponsored evaluation of protected bike lanes in the United States.

She has been the director of Portland State University’s transportation research and education center since 2009, building an initial grant program into a national university transportation center (UTC) that houses PSU’s transportation research, the NITC program and the Initiative for Bicycle and Pedestrian Innovation (IBPI).

Her work as the UTC director places a strong emphasis on technology transfer and getting research into practice, as well as multi-disciplinary and widespread community collaboration. The Dale Prize committee seeks out scholars who share research on methods and processes for making streets that support active travel.

The visit to Cal Poly allows prize recipients to converse with other professionals and to engage with students about the future of the discipline.

The Dale Prize is made possible by an endowment provided by the late June Dale, wife of the late William R. Dale, who was a founding faculty member of the urban and regional planning department at Cal Poly.