Nolan Nicholson, a Notre Dame junior majoring in civil engineering, has received the 2024 Robert P. Wadell Transportation Engineering Scholarship, a national-level award given by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) to an outstanding undergraduate pursuing a career in transportation engineering.
Scholarship winners are selected based on their academic performance, recommendations, and an essay, addressing the question of how transportation engineering can be improved.
Nicholson proposed two key improvements. “We could benefit from better integrated public and private transportation systems—similar to what I saw during my summer abroad experience in Berlin, Germany,” said Nicholson. “Also, using GIS to visualize socio-economic factors during the design of public transportation.”
Nicholson has held several leadership positions, serving as treasurer and then co-president of the Notre Dame Student Chapter of the American Society of Civil Engineers. Additionally, he was captain of the Transportation Competition at the 2024 ASCE Indiana-Kentucky Student Conference Symposium and will be the financial chair of the 2025 Symposium hosted by Notre Dame.
This summer, Nicholson returns to Kimley Horn, where last year he served as a transportation planning and traffic operations intern.
— Karla Cruise, Notre Dame Engineering