Two students awarded full tuition and monthly stipend from UPS Foundation
The MIT Center for Transportation & Logistics (CTL) is pleased to announce the recipients of the UPS Fellowship for the 2024–25 academic year. Made possible by a grant from the UPS Foundation, the UPS Fellowship continues its mission to champion outstanding students with financial support of two exceptional students, one incoming MIT Master’s student and one MIT PhD student pursuing scholarship relating to logistics, freight transportation, supply chain management, or a related topic. A continuation of a program started in 1983, the UPS Fellowship aims to recognize and reward excellence in these fields, and selections are awarded solely on the basis of merit.
This year’s fellowship recipients are:
Erin Bahm
Erin Bahm is an incoming student in the MIT Supply Chain Management master’s program who comes to CTL as a Senior Inventory Operations Analyst for Target in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where she stepped into a role managing the end-to-end purchasing and positioning of multiple perishable food categories. Her strength in process improvement led to a promotion in Inventory Operations, where she was responsible for leading a cross-functional initiative to implement ordering optimization changes to over 300 vendors. In her role she consulted with global supply chain partners on new process initiatives to ensure order volume accuracy and replenishment agility across networks.
As a member of Michigan State University's undergraduate Applied Engineering Sciences class of 2020, Erin was also the recipient of an MIT Supply Chain Excellence Award. Since graduating, she has continued her studies with the completion of a Women's Leadership course through the Yale School of Management's Executive Education program, and she has earned a verified certificate in Supply Chain Analytics through MITx MicroMasters®. As a leader, Erin has moderated a career development panel series, and has expanded Target's new hire mentorship program.
Steven Parks
Steven Parks is a PhD candidate in transportation engineering at MIT, where he led a 16-month research project with Amazon World-Wide Real Estate Operations as a Research Assistant in the MIT Megacity Logistics Lab at MIT CTL, working to quantify the net traffic congestion effects of last-mile E-commerce activities at city scale. The project, for which Steven built a macroscopic traffic simulation model to estimate congestion caused by E-commerce for three major U.S. cities, led to recommendations to reduce congestion footprints were published through a whitepaper in 2024. "Steven's work was of critical importance for the success of the project and the reach and academic impact of the research challenge for us and our counterparts at Amazon," said Matthias Winkenbach, Steven's advisor and Director of the MIT Megacity Logistics Lab. "Steven’s research is answering the question how we can best plan recurring vehicle routes for given demand patterns, road network properties, and other environmental or operational factors related to urban form. This is a highly relevant and timely question with many real-world implications for both freight logistics and passenger transportation systems."
Steven is a graduate of Santa Clara University, where he was recognized as a Santa Clara University Johnson Scholar and earned his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering, and received his M.S. in Transportation Engineering at University of California, Berkeley. He has been awarded the Dwight D. Eisenhower Transportation Fellowship, the Professor Joseph M. Sussman Best Paper Prize, and first place in the Santa Clara University Mechanical Engineering Senior Design Conference for his work on disaster relief communications.
"The UPS Fellowships exemplify MIT CTL's dedication to infusing innovation into real-world applications, upholding the highest standards of academic inquiry," said Chris Caplice, Executive Director of MIT CTL. "These fellowships, with the generous backing of the UPS Foundation, stand as indispensable assets in nurturing talents such as Erin and Steven. Their contributions will help to shape the future landscape of the supply chain industry."
Please join us in congratulating Erin and Steven!