2026 Frances Fowler Wallace Memorial Award: Hamidur Rahman

Hamidur Rahman, a doctoral student in the Community and Regional Planning program at The University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture, has been selected to receive a Frances Fowler Wallace Memorial Award. The award will support research expenses for his work to understand how the daily struggle of getting to where one needs to go affects one’s mental health, and why this connection has been so overlooked. Hamidur’s work will make an important contribution to the research literature on whether transportation insecurity is a pathway through which disadvantaged community conditions become psychologically consequential.

Frances Fowler Wallace, the award’s namesake, was married to John Forsythe Wallace, a member of the Texas House of Representatives and the State Board of Control during the 1920s and 30s. Ms. Wallace died in Austin on July 18, 1972, at the age of 80. As directed in her will, the memorial award provides partial support for doctoral students’ dissertation research on “the cause, treatment, cure, and prevention of mental disease, mental illness, and mental disorders.” The award provides up to $3,000 for research-related expenses.

We spoke with Hamidur about his research:

Tell us about yourself. At what point did you decide to pursue a career in mental health research, and what influenced that decision?

I am a fourth-year doctoral student in the Community and Regional Planning program at The University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture. My background in urban transportation planning research and practice led me to examine the link between people’s unmet transportation needs and the effects of those needs on daily life. I became particularly interested in the transportation system’s impact on mental health during my early doctoral years, when I was exposed to work on transportation disadvantage, transportation poverty, quality of life, and well-being.

The research of my advisor, Dr. Alex Karner, further motivated me to understand the distributive impacts of transportation benefits and burdens for underserved and marginalized population groups. Living in a car-centric city like Austin, without a personal vehicle gave me first-hand insight into how the design of a transportation system shapes people’s daily stress, sense of safety, sense of connectedness, sense of possibility, and overall freedom. The experiences addressed by the research question feel personal and urgent: how does the daily struggle of getting to where one needs to go affect one’s mental health, and why has this connection been so overlooked? I decided to build a research career by answering it.

Your dissertation is titled “From Transportation Disadvantage to Transportation Insecurity: Understanding Pathways to Mental Health and Well-Being.” What questions are you trying to answer with this work?

At the heart of this research is a question that sounds simple but has surprisingly few answers: when people cannot reliably get to where they need to go, what does that do to their health and well-being? I am trying to understand:

• What factors impact people’s transportation insecurity?
• How well do spatial transportation conditions predict individual transportation insecurity?
• How is transportation insecurity associated with depressive symptoms, anxiety symptoms, and psychological distress?
• Does transportation insecurity mediate the relationship between spatial transportation conditions and mental health outcomes?
• Do these relationships vary by income, disability, age, race and ethnicity, immigration status, English proficiency, gender, vehicle access, or geographic context?
• What level of transportation access do people need to maintain their social participation and psychological well-being?

What led to your taking a professional interest in this particular topic?

Throughout my graduate career I have studied transportation disadvantage, including accessibility to essential destinations, travel behavior, and the spatial inequities produced by transportation and land-use patterns. When I reviewed the existing literature, I noticed a significant gap — transportation research identifies disadvantage through objective indicators such as travel time, cost, and vehicle availability, which can locate under-resourced places but cannot establish how residents experience those conditions or whether those experiences are associated with mental health. Therefore, I became interested in pursuing a more integrated understanding of transportation hardship, one that connects the conditions built into places with the insecurity people experience and treats both as consequential for mental health and well-being.

What gaps in the literature will be filled by your study? Who stands to benefit from it?

Mental health research has long treated housing, food, employment, and healthcare access as social determinants of mental health while giving far less attention to transportation insecurity as a distinct form of hardship, and few studies have measured place-based transportation conditions, lived transportation insecurity, and validated mental health outcomes together in the same population.

Filling that gap will allow me to test whether transportation insecurity is a pathway through which disadvantaged community conditions become psychologically consequential, a link that has been assumed but not established. People with low incomes, disabilities, limited English proficiency, or no reliable vehicle access stand to benefit most directly, along with the transportation planners, public health agencies, and community organizations that need evidence on which specific, modifiable transportation conditions to change.

How do you think your research methods and approach will help you to answer the questions that you’re posing?

My dissertation uses two complementary approaches that work together. The first uses geographic information systems and spatial data to map where transportation access deficits and mental health burden overlap, identifying which communities face the greatest risk. The second deploys a survey in those communities, asking residents directly about their transportation experiences, using a validated instrument called the Transportation Security Index (TSI) alongside standard mental health measures. Together, these two approaches allow me to move from identifying where the problem is concentrated to understanding how it operates in people’s lives, and to test whether data shown by maps matches what people report experiencing in their lives.

Are there any suggested readings you can recommend for those who might be interested in learning more about this topic?

Yes, I have a few suggested readings on this topic that I am excited to share!

• Murphy, A. K., McDonald-Lopez, K., Pilkauskas, N., & Gould-Werth, A. (2022). Transportation insecurity in the United States: A descriptive portrait. Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World, 8, 1–18.
• Lucas, K., Mattioli, G., Verlinghieri, E., & Guzman, A. (2016). Transport poverty and its adverse social consequences. Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers – Transport, 169(6), 353–365.
• McDonald-Lopez, K., Murphy, A. K., Gould-Werth, A., Griffin, J., Bader, M. D. M., & Kovski, N. (2023). A driver in health outcomes: Developing discrete categories of transportation insecurity. American Journal of Epidemiology, 192(11), 1854–1863.
• Stanley, J. K., Hensher, D. A., Stanley, J. R., & Vella-Brodrick, D. (2011). Mobility, social exclusion and well-being: Exploring the links. Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, 45(8), 789–801.

Related Content