Madeleine Bonsma-Fisher (she/her) is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Civil & Mineral Engineering and Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering at the University of Toronto. Madeleine holds a Masters and PhD in Physics from the University of Toronto and a Bachelor of Science in physics at the University of Waterloo. Despite all the physics, she was never all that interested in "real" physics and was always looking for interesting research at the edges of other fields. In graduate school, Madeleine studied bacteria and virus evolutionary dynamics with a physics approach, and in her postdoctoral work Madeleine applies data science and physics thinking to understand transportation networks.
Cycling is a fun, healthy, and sustainable method of travel, but access to destinations on low-stress cycling routes in Canadian cities is both limited and unevenly distributed. As a member of the Sustainable Systems Research Group under Dr. Shoshanna Saxe and the Applied Optimization Lab under Dr. Timothy Chan, Madeleine has worked on several projects to quantify the impacts of cycling infrastructure and prioritize evidence-based infrastructure investments. In collaboration with the City of Toronto, Madeleine has optimized the placement of new cycling infrastructure to understand tradeoffs between efficiency-focused and equity-focused goals and studied usage patterns of cycling infrastructure in Toronto using Strava data. Her ongoing work focuses on integrating cycling and emerging mobility into multimodal transport modelling to understand the impact of infrastructure on mode shifts and overall traffic patterns.
Madeleine’s work has supported evidence-driven transportation policy through collaborations with government partners, presenting to a committee of the Legislative Assembly of Ontario on the impacts of bike lane removal, opinion pieces, and media interviews.
When not frowning at her computer screen, Madeleine likes to do crafts, garden, go to the park with her two children, and ride bikes with her family.