CITT News

After nearly two decades of service at the Center for International Trade and Transportation (CITT), Tom O’Brien, Ph.D., was recently appointed as Associate Dean of the College of Professional and Continuing Education (CPaCE) at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB). During the October 24, 2023 CITT Policy and Steering Committee meeting, CPaCE Dean Chris Swarat announced that Tyler Reeb, Ph.D., who has served as CITT’s Director of the Research and Workforce Development since 2015, would assume O’Brien’s leadership role as CITT’s Interim Executive Director.

O’Brien is one of two new Associate Deans to join the CPaCE team. He is joined by Alysa Turkowitz, Ed.D. Turkowitz previously served as Executive Director of the Master of Financial Engineering program at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management. During her tenure, the program achieved 100 percent employment placement and 40 percent growth in size. 

Although O’Brien is transitioning to a new role, he will remain actively involved in mission-critical trade and transportation research, education, and policy efforts. “The good news is that I'm not going too far,” O’Brien said, adding that the “even better news is that, as Associate Dean, I will have a platform that will allow me to raise the profile of the work that CITT does and share it with an audience that extends to the rest of the campus and beyond.”

O’Brien began as an Applied Research Coordinator at CITT in 2004 while pursuing a doctorate in Urban Planning at the University of Southern California. Over the next 11 years, O’Brien worked with founding Executive Director Marianne Venieris Gastelum to help CITT expand the scope of its work to include a broader research and development profile. O’Brien was appointed as CITT Executive Director in 2015.

“It has been an honor for me to collaborate with Tom over the last nine years on a wide range of research, policy, and curricular development projects,” Reeb said. “I look forward to continued collaborations with Tom in his new role.”

Reeb is the principal author and editor of the book Empowering the New Mobility Workforce (Elsevier 2019), which was endorsed by the late Norman Mineta. He is a member of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Rural Transportation Issues Coordinating Council (A0040C) and two standing committees focused on Native American mobility issues (AME30) and workforce development and organizational excellence (AJE15). His research‐driven reports, publications, and curricular development programs address supply chain and logistics, public transit, and Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). Transportation in GIS, a pilot class that Reeb developed in partnership with Los Angeles Trade Technical College, won the American Planning Association Award of Excellence for Opportunity and Empowerment. He is currently pilot testing ITS and data science talent pipeline programs at CSULB in partnership with Gannett Fleming and Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Established in 1999, CITT is dedicated to delivering educational programs, innovative research, and community outreach in the area of goods movement. CITT is the Long Beach home for four major research centers: METRANS Transportation Consortium, a U.S. Department of Transportation-designated university transportation center; the U.C. Davis-led National Center for Sustainable Transportation; and MetroFreight, a Volvo Research and Education Foundations Center of Excellence in Urban Freight based at the University of Southern California.

For press inquiries, please contact Tyler Reeb at tyler.reeb@csulb.edu.