Research focused on mobility equity on some of Michigan’s larger islands has earned a transportation engineering student the 2024 MSU Graduate Student Award for Community Engagement Scholarship.

Farish Jazlan will be honored for his Community-Engaged Service and Practice work during the MSU Outreach and Engagement Awards ceremony at 4:30 p.m. on March 21 in the Kellogg Hotel and Conference Center.

Jazlan is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. His adviser is CEE Associate Professor Ali Zockaie.

Through a Michigan Department of Transportation, or MDOT, grant, Jazlan worked to identify mobility gaps for residents who live on Beaver, Drummond, Neebish, and Sugar Islands.

Those islands have some of the state’s largest ferry operations by ridership volume. The project was conducted from Jan. 2021 to June 2023.

“The residents of these islands expect to have as much equal access to work, healthcare,
emergency services, and economic opportunities as the mainland residents,” Jazlan said. “Public ferries should be viewed as a natural extension of highways and therefore be governed accordingly.

“Ferry operators, ferry riders, business owners, property owners, tribal communities, and broader island communities at large were proactively engaged to understand the supply and demand side of the ferry system,” Jazlan said. “The project covered a wide latitude to derive meaningful policy and fiscal governance recommendations for state authorities and policymakers.”

Jazlan is originally from Malaysia. He received a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering and economics from MSU and has an extensive background in public policy and business strategy.

This story originally appeared on the College of Engineering website.