I learned a couple of days ago that there will be a new Director at the National Center for Transportation Studies (NCTS) at the University of the Philippines in Diliman soon. The new Director will be Dr. Ma. Sheilah G. Napalang who is a tenured faculty member of the university’s School of Urban and Regional Planning. She is to be the first woman head of the center, which used to be called the Transport Training Center that was created in the 1970s as part of the Japanese Government’s technical assistance to the Government of the Philippines to increase capacity and capability in transportation planning, engineering and management. Dr. Napalang will be the first Director from SURP since 2001 (since that time, all Directors were from the College of Engineering). She was a former senior technical staff of the NCTS before she joined the SURP and obtained her advanced degrees from the US (masters’ at Virginia Tech) and Japan (Dr. Eng. at Tokyo Tech).

More on this development and perhaps the turnover once everything is final and formalized.

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