Biography

RAM M. PENDYALA 

Ram Pendyala is a Professor of Transportation Systems in the newly formed School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment (previously the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Sustainable Engineering) at Arizona State University (ASU) in Tempe.  Dr. Pendyala teaches courses and conducts research in multimodal transportation systems planning, activity-based travel behavior modeling, time use and activity pattern analysis, freight and passenger travel demand forecasting, travel survey methods, microsimulation approaches, and the application of advanced econometric and statistical methods for transportation policy analysis. His expertise lies in the study of sustainable mobility, analysis of public transportation systems including bus and rail technologies, and modeling the land use, transportation, energy, and air quality impacts of a wide range of transportation policies and technology solutions including pricing-based strategies. Dr. Pendyala has conducted more than $5 million in sponsored research for a variety of government agencies in these topic areas. Prior to joining ASU in Fall 2006 he served for 12 years as a transportation faculty member and 6 years as graduate programs coordinator at the University of South Florida Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering in Tampa. He has also served as a visiting professor in Vienna, Austria and is regularly invited by universities, research institutes, and public agencies around the world to give seminars and write resource papers related to his areas of expertise. In particular, Dr. Pendyala has been leading international groups of researchers in analyzing activity-travel behavior characteristics and developing state-of-the-art activity-based microsimulation models of travel demand. Dr. Pendyala has advised more than 50 graduate students who are now employed in leading government agencies, private consulting firms, and academic institutions.

Dr. Pendyala’s research has primarily focused on the development and implementation of new methods for modeling, understanding, and forecasting travel demand. Dr. Pendyala is a pioneer in the development of new activity-based microsimulation models of travel behavior that are viewed as the next generation of tools that transportation planners will use to forecast travel demand on all modes of transportation. Dr. Pendyala has published extensively in this area of research and has established an international reputation in the field. Dr. Pendyala is also heavily involved in the development of GIS tools for multimodal travel forecasting and has spearheaded the development of new transit planning software that can be used for route and service planning.   Recently, Dr. Pendyala was awarded more than $1 million in research funding by the Federal Highway Administration of the US Department of Transportation to develop new methods for modeling land use, travel demand, and multimodal transport networks in integrated microsimulation frameworks.  

Dr. Pendyala has published nearly 100 articles in international journals such as Transportation, Transportation Research, Transport Policy, Journal of Transportation and Statistics, Environment and Planning, Transportation Letters, and Journal of the Transportation Research Board and several reputed books in the field. Dr. Pendyala serves on the editorial boards of Transportation, Transport Reviews, Journal of Choice Modeling, and Transportation Letters.  He serves as the Chair of the Travel Analysis Methods Section of the Transportation Research Board, a unit of the National Research Council of the National Academies, and is the immediate Chair of its Committee on Traveler Behavior and Values.  He recently served as Guest Editor of two Special Issues of Transportation dedicated to advancing the state-of-the-art in modeling and analyzing activity and travel behavior. Dr. Pendyala has served on several expert review panels for the USDOT and National Science Foundation, and for local government agencies such as the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG) and Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning (CMAP). He is also the current Chair and previous Vice-Chair/Chair-Elect and past Secretary/Treasurer of the International Association for Travel Behavior Research (IATBR), and a member of several technical committees of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) and Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE).

Dr. Pendyala has his Ph.D. and Master’s degrees in Civil Engineering with a specialization in transportation systems from the University of California at Davis. He obtained his Bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology - Madras (IIT=M) in Chennai, India.