Laurie Garrow | Co-Director
Center for Urban and Regional Air Mobility

Laurie Garrow is a Professor in the Schools of Civil and Aerospace Engineering and serves as Co-Director for the Center for Urban and Regional Air Mobility (CURAM) at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.  She is also Past President of AGIFORS, a nonprofit organization that focus on airline research. She is the first woman and the first academic to serve as President in AGIFORS’ 60-year history. Dr. Garrow earned her Ph.D. in Civil Engineering at Northwestern University, with an emphasis on travel demand modeling and airline passenger behavior. Her dissertation won first prize in the 2004 INFORMS Aviation Applications Section and honorable mention in the 2004 Eric Pas dissertation competition sponsored by the International Association of Travel Behavior Research (IATBR).  She is the recipient of several research awards, including ASCE’s Walter L. Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize “for development and integration of advanced discrete choice models of traveler behavior into airline planning, scheduling, and revenue management decision support systems.” In her role as Co-Director of CURAM, Dr. Garrow has conducted research in advanced air mobility that has focused on understanding demand for these new modes of transportation.  An open-access article published in Transportation Research Part C provides a comprehensive review of academic research in advanced air mobility and identifies potential areas of research. She is also an instructor of a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) in advanced air mobility, done in collaboration with Munich Aerospace. In her role as Past President of AGIFORS, she has published several articles documenting both the airline industry’s response to COVID-19 as well as innovations that were inspired by the crisis and road to recovery.  She is a frequent contributor to the media, and has been featured in Barron’s, IEEE Spectrum, and OR/MS Today.  She has also been quoted in articles for Bloomberg, CNN Travel, the LA Times, USA Today, and the Washington Post.  Laurie and her husband, Michael, live in Atlanta with three rescue cats, PeaPod, Smuckers, and Shadow.