Dr. Ram M. Pendyala, a professor of transportation systems in the civil, environmental, and sustainable engineering program at Arizona State University in Tempe, is the 2018 recipient of the American Road & Transportation Builders Association’s (ARTBA) prestigious S.S. Steinberg Award. He was honored Jan. 8 during the association’s annual Research & Education Division (RED) meeting, held in the Nation’s Capital.
Named after the founding president of RED, the award recognizes “an individual who has made remarkable contributions to transportation education.”
In addition to his classes, Pendyala 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. He has advised more than 50 graduate students who are now employed in leading positions at government agencies, private consulting firms, and academic institutions. He also serves as the director of the center for Teaching Old Models New Tricks (TOMNET), a U.S. Department of Transportation Tier 1 University Transportation Center.
Prior to joining ASU, he spent 12 years as a transportation faculty member and six years as graduate programs coordinator at the University of South Florida in Tampa. He was a visiting professor in Vienna, Austria, and has served as an expert advisor and consultant to the World Bank on the evaluation of infrastructure improvements. He has published over 150 articles in international journals and is currently serving as an associate editor for Transportation Research Part D.
Pendyala received his Ph.D. and master’s in civil engineering with a specialization in transportation from the University of California at Davis, and his bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology – Madras, in Chennai, India.
Established in 1902, Washington, D.C.-based ARTBA is the “consensus voice” of the U.S. transportation design and construction industry before Congress, federal agencies, the White House, news media and the general public.