Chapter History

From Iowa Department or Transportation Director Mark Lowe: “Last September (2018) I was at the AASHTO (American Association of State Highway & Transportation) fall meeting and saw a presentation about WTS, which stands for Women in Transportation Seminar. WTS, is a 40+ year-old international organization whose mission is to attract, sustain, connect, and advance women’s careers to strengthen the transportation industry, and whose vision is equity and access for women in transportation. One of the things I quickly learned was that Iowa was one of the states that didn’t have a chapter.

I got some preliminary information on how to start a chapter from the WTS representatives and bounced it off Tammy Nicholson, Director of our Location & Environment Bureau. Tammy quickly enlisted Angie Poole, Safety Data Analyst in our Traffic & Safety Bureau, who had expressed the need for more support for female employees at the Iowa DOT. From there, the rest, as they say, is history.

Angie and Tammy took the ball and ran, reaching out to women in both the public and private sectors to create a core group of people to help make the WTS Iowa Chapter a reality. This core group includes Angie, Tammy, and Darcy Doty, Director of our Driver & Identification Services Bureau, Shauna Hallmark, Director of Iowa State University’s Institute for Transportation (InTrans), Stacy Woodson and Megan Anderson from HR Green, Brenda Durbahn from HG Consult, Laura Lutz-Zimmerman from HDR, and Anna Smith from Terracon. This small group of professionals has been working hard to establish the chapter, developing goals, managing logistics, and for most of them, taking a crash course in event planning.”