Dr. Gulsah Akar

Biography

Gulsah Akar is a Professor and Chair at the School of City and Regional Planning at Georgia Tech. She conducts research on sustainable urban mobility, leading projects that investigate the connections between the built environment and travel behaviors. Using state-of-the-art data collection technologies, her work measures access equity and demographic differences in travel outcomes, as well as the adoption of new mobility technologies. Over her career, she has co-authored 35 peer-reviewed articles in top-tier journals. Akar joined Georgia Tech in 2021 after serving as a faculty member at Ohio State University, where she led the PhD program unit from 2015 to 2021 and was the Research Program Lead at the Sustainability Institute, providing direction for research on Smart Resilient Communities. She has also been an editor for the Journal of Planning Literature and has served in various leadership roles within the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning and multiple Transportation Research Board Committees. Akar holds a Ph.D. from the University of Maryland and both B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees from Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey.

Research Interests