Megan Ryerson

Megan Ryerson is the UPS Foundation Chair of Transportation and Professor of City and Regional Planning in the Stuart Weitzman School of Design and Electrical and Systems Engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Pennsylvania. She earned her Bachelor of Science in Systems Engineering with a minor in Mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania in 2003, Master of Science in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 2006, and Doctor of Philosophy in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 2010. As Chair of the Department of City and Regional Planning, she leads initiatives in urban planning education and research.

Dr. Ryerson's research emphasis is in transportation engineering and planning, with a focus on intercity transportation planning, urban transportation safety, and air transportation including environmental impacts, economic development, and multimodal planning. In 2024, she was awarded a $6M NASA University Leadership Initiative award to study, develop, and deploy solutions for aviation system resilience. She founded the Center for Safe Mobility, developing novel human-centered transportation safety metrics and evaluating safety-focused policies. Dr. Ryerson has published over 65 peer-reviewed articles, including "Time to burn: Flight delay, terminal efficiency, and fuel consumption in the National Airspace System" (Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, 2014), "Capturing the impact of fuel price on jet aircraft operating costs with Leontief technology and econometric models" (Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies, 2013), and "The potential of turboprops for reducing aviation fuel consumption" (Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment, 2010). She has counseled major airlines, cities, universities, airports, Port Authorities, and the Federal Aviation Administration. As the first Associate Dean for Research at the Weitzman School of Design, she founded the Research Support Center and oversaw a more than 300% increase in awarded grants during her five-year tenure. She is a Senior Fellow at the Penn Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics and the Center for Injury Research and Prevention at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, co-PI of the Center for Air Transportation Systems Resilience, Faculty Fellow at the Penn Institute for Urban Research, and Faculty Advisor for the Transportation Initiative at Penn. For her mentorship and accomplishments in advancing women in transportation, she received the Women’s Transportation Seminar-Philadelphia Chapter Woman of the Year award in 2015.

Professional Email: mryerson@design.upenn.edu