Timothy Young received the Young Leader Award at CUTA’s 2025 Awards Ceremony in Montreal.

Timothy Young, a PhD candidate at York University, is a rising leader in Canadian transit, combining academic expertise in pedestrian microsimulation, rail infrastructure, human behaviour, and station design with hands-on industry experience. As past President of the ITE York University Chapter, he maintained high student engagement during the COVID-19 pandemic through virtual events and outreach. Nationally, he contributed to the 2019 CUTA Young Leaders Summit and co-led the Minding the Gap Transit Education Project, the first nationwide study assessing transit content in Canadian engineering curricula, producing actionable recommendations for industry-academic alignment. 

Timothy serves as Special Advisor to CUTA’s Youth & Emerging Leaders Sub-Committee and Deputy Lead for the Careers in Public Transit Outreach Program, helping transition it into a permanent initiative reaching secondary and post-secondary students. As Chair of Programming & Curriculum for the 2023 and 2025 Young Leaders Summits, he has designed high-impact programs of technical tours, workshops, and networking sessions that inspire and equip future transit professionals. 

His leadership is marked by resilience, strategic thinking, and stakeholder management, producing tangible, lasting outcomes: sustained student engagement during the pandemic, national research influencing policy, successful summit programming, and the institutionalization of youth transit initiatives. Timothy’s work strengthens Canada’s transit talent pipeline, aligns academia with industry needs, and ensures youth leadership remains central to CUTA’s national activities, making him a transformative figure in Canadian transit.