Patricia Mokhtarian is a Regents Professor and the Clifford and William Greene, Jr. Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) at the Georgia Institute of Technology.  Prior to joining Georgia Tech in 2013, she served 23 years on the CEE faculty at the University of California, Davis, after spending several years in regional transportation planning and consulting in Southern California.  Prof. Mokhtarian has specialized in the study of attitudinal influences on travel behavior for more than 45 years, and has authored or co-authored nearly 200 peer-reviewed journal articles, as well as numerous book chapters and research reports.  She is among the most highly-cited scholars in travel behavior research, with more than 41,000 citations and an h-index of 98 (Google Scholar). She is a past Chair of the International Association for Travel Behaviour Research, and received a Lifetime Achievement Award from that society in 2021.  Prof. Mokhtarian was elected to the US National Academy of Engineering in 2024, and serves on the editorial boards of ten transportation journals.

Research

A key research interest has been the impact of telecommunications technology on travel behavior (particularly teleworking adoption and impacts). Additional interests include the influence of the built environment on travel behavior, accounting for self-selection biases in modeling behavior, attitudes toward travel itself, time use and multitasking, incorporating attitudes into practice-oriented travel demand forecasting models, impacts of autonomous vehicles, congestion-response behavior, and subjective well-being.

Education

Ph.D., Northwestern University, 1981

M.S., Northwestern University, 1977

B.A., Florida State University, 1975

Teaching

At the undergraduate level, Prof. Mokhtarian teaches upper-division probability and statistics, and at the graduate level she teaches statistical analysis, survey (questionnaire) design and analysis, and discrete choice modeling.

Distinctions & Awards

• Invited speaker, endowed lecture series: “How Much Do Attitudinal Variables Improve Travel Demand Models?  Evaluation Using an Overlap Sample from an Attitude-rich Survey and the 2017 National Household Travel Survey”. University of Michigan, Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering Richart-Woods Lecture, February 13, 2025.
• Appointed Regents’ Professor, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2024.
• Elected to the National Academy of Engineering, 2024.
• In 2024, my student Dr. Xinyi Wang received the prestigious and competitive Eric I. Pas Dissertation Prize of the International Association for Travel Behaviour Research, given to the best doctoral thesis in travel behavior in the world, among those completed in calendar year 2023.
• Best PhD Thesis Award to my student Dr. Xinyi Wang, Sigma Xi, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2024.
• Best PhD Thesis Award to my student Dr. Xinyi Wang, School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2023.
• “Latent class model with an error structure: Investigating potential unobserved associations between latent segmentation and behavior generation” (by Sung Hoo Kim and Patricia L. Mokhtarian) selected for the Outstanding Paper Award of Committee AEP 35 (The Effects of Information and Communication Technologies on Transportation Choices) of the Transportation Research Board, 2024 Annual Meeting.
• One of six members (and the only woman) of the inaugural class of Northwestern University Transportation Center Fellows, recognizing “impactful contributions to the transportation profession in research, policy, practice or education, and special connections to the Transportation Center and Northwestern University”, November 17, 2023.
• My students won the (U.S.) Council of University Transportation Centers Wootan Awards for Outstanding PhD Dissertation in Policy & Planning (F. Atiyya Shaw) and Outstanding MS Thesis in Policy & Planning (Xinyi Wang), in 2021.
• International Association for Travel Behaviour Research 2021 Lifetime Achievement Award, given to someone who has “made fundamental and sustained contributions to travel behaviour research for a substantial period (typically at least 25 years) up to the present time”; is “widely known, at the very least among the IATBR community”; and has “influenced the field through her/his writings, teaching, service, and nurturing of younger professionals”, June 2, 2021 online, and December 14, 2022 in person.
• Outstanding Industry Contributor Award, “given to an individual who in embodying the Zephyr Principles, has selflessly contributed to the good of the industry through the body of their work”, bestowed by the Zephyr Foundation (https://zephyrtransport.org/), a non-profit dedicated to “advancing rigorous transportation and land use decision-making for the public good by advocating for and supporting improved travel analysis, and facilitating its implementation”, March 24, 2021.
• Clifford and William Greene, Jr. Professorship, School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2021 – present.
• Named a National Associate of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, February 5, 2020.