Ram Pendyala

Professor Ram Pendyala is the director of ASU’s the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment  in the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering . He teaches and conducts research in transportation systems engineering, design, modeling and simulation, travel behavior analysis, multimodal transport policy analysis, freight and passenger travel demand forecasting, travel survey methods and transportation economics and finance.

Pendyala directs TOMNET (Teaching Old Models New Tricks), a Tier 1 University Transportation Center sponsored by the U.S. Department of Transportation. The center focuses on advancing transportation system operations and mobility of people and goods by striving to harness data analytics and behavioral science to understand, explain and forecast how people travel and make mobility choices under different conditions. The goal is to develop transportation forecasting models for the next generations of transportation infrastructure systems, new mobility services and automated transportation technologies.

Pendyala is on the editorial boards of leading transportation journals, has conducted more than $12 million in sponsored research and published more 200 research articles, and been a consultant for several transportation industry organizations.

He has received a Service Recognition Award for his work as the chair of the national Transportation Research Board’s planning and environment group and served on several advisory panels for federal, state and local transportation agencies around the country.

Pendyala also holds or has held leadership positions in professional associations such as the International Association for Travel Behaviour Research and the American Society of Civil Engineers. 

He has won the American Road & Transportation Builders Association S.S. Steinberg Award recognizing outstanding contributions to transportation education, and twice shared with coauthors the Transportation Research Board’s Pyke Johnson Award for outstanding research publication in transportation systems planning and administration.

Pendyala first joined ASU in 2006 after serving 12 years on the faculty of the University of South Florida in Tampa. Between 2014 and 2016 he served as the Frederick R. Dickerson Chair Professor of Transportation in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Georgia Tech.