Christine Hanna

My career in transportation engineering has been driven by a passion that feels like common sense to me. When I design projects or attend classes, everything just comes naturally because I'm motivated by safety and keeping life going so people can enjoy it. I don't want anyone losing their life for anything that can be avoided. Growing up, my oldest sister was an architecture engineer, and I used to help her with senior design projects and building structures, which sparked my interest in roadway design. What really drives me is serving the public from a safety perspective - I believe safety is very important and should be focused on, even though maybe the public doesn't realize that these things are studied and accounted for their safety and traveling. I'm proud of every project I complete because when it gets designed and built and I go visit, I can see it's successful. I look at why accidents happened at a location - is it the angle, the speed, the signal - and I'm proud of improving the safety of the public and avoiding someone's life being lost because of poor design that happened long ago. From the environment perspective, I put a lot of focus on adding trees, avoiding impacting wetlands, and including pedestrian and bicyclists, so it's not just for traveling through cars. One of my passions has been pushing for bike lanes on roadways within the Wisconsin DOT, especially after a friend lost her girl because she was riding her bike and there was no bike lane and she got hit by a speeding car. Every type of mode of transportation should be included and be successful and safe. Things that have been taken for granted for a very long time, in my opinion, that's ignorance and a negative attitude - we have to investigate why and look into ways to fix it.