Brynn Woolley

Passionate about

About Me

Everyone is a problem solver. That's not special. I thrive as a problem seeker—finding ambiguous, poorly-defined problems before anyone's named them, and shaping them into something structured enough to solve.

I want to predict the future and fix things before they break. That's part of why I study travel behavior. People are harder to model than most systems. They react to the systems built around them. And the world they move through keeps changing faster than ever before.

  • Current: PhD Candidate, Civil Engineering — University of Michigan
  • Background: BS, Applied & Computational Mathematics — BYU
  • Focus: Travel Behavior, Data Quality, Passive Data, Machine Learning
  • Toolkit: Researcher, Programmer, Modeler, Data Scientist

My work sits where statistics, data science, and transportation systems meet. I study how to make massive, messy, passively-collected smartphone location data trustworthy enough to model travel behavior—characterizing bias, validating representativeness, and building the pipelines that turn raw data into something researchers and practitioners can rely on.

Resume

Education

Ph.D., Civil Engineering (Next Generation Transportation Systems)

2024 - Expected 2029

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI

Dual M.A., Statistics

2026 - Expected 2029

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI

B.S., Applied & Computational Mathematics

2019 - 2024

Brigham Young University, Provo, UT

  • Concentration: Transportation Systems Engineering

Publications & Awards

Completeness Filtering & Representativeness in Location-Based Services Data

2026

Presented at TRB 2026 and ASCE ICTD 2026

Transportation Technology Tournament — National Champion

2025

Co-Lead, NOCoE / ITS JPO / ITE

Research Experience

Graduate Research Assistant

2024 - Present

Infrastructure for All (INFRALL) Lab, University of Michigan

  • Develop statistical frameworks to replace heuristic filtering thresholds in smartphone location data with empirically-derived, data-driven cutoffs, using classification and proxy labeling in the absence of ground-truth validation
  • Characterize how filtering decisions shift the demographic representativeness of mobility datasets across the quality–retention tradeoff
  • Process 20+ TB of national-scale GPS panel data via high-performance computing clusters and DuckDB-based SQL pipelines

Undergraduate Research Assistant

2022 - 2024

BYU Transportation Lab

  • Analyzed e-scooter route selection in relation to pavement roughness data
  • Built MATSim microsimulations of Utah's Wasatch Front to optimize incident management team performance

Undergraduate Research Assistant

2022 - 2024

Mathematical Fire & Industry Research (F.I.R.E.) Lab, BYU

  • Forecasted urban wildfire vulnerability using an interdisciplinary predictive model

Skills

Python

NumPy, SciPy, SymPy, PySpark, Matplotlib, Seaborn, Scikit-Learn, Pandas, Geopandas, Shapely, Folium

Other Languages

Competence in C++, Java, HTML, SQL, and Unix Shell for Command-Line Operations

Software

MATSim, CUBE (Bentley Systems), ArcGIS Pro, QGIS, AutoCAD, Revit

Machine Learning and Neural Networks

Expertise in machine learning, including neural networks, for predictive modeling and data-driven insights

Statistical Analysis and Time Series Modeling

Proficient in ARIMA models, Bayesian modeling, and state-space techniques for data analysis and prediction.

Mathematical Modeling and Simulation

Skilled in differential equations, numerical methods, and dynamical systems for modeling and simulating complex engineering systems.

Technical Writing

Proficient in preparing clear and concise technical reports, research papers, etc.

Multidisciplinary Collaboration

Experienced in effective teamwork within diverse research projects, integrating insights from various fields to achieve common objectives

Presenting

Skilled at conveying complex concepts to diverse audiences

Contact

To contact me please send me an email at bwoolley@umich.edu or reach out to me via LinkedIn.