Rate My Professor Megan Ryerson

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.