Her research centers on transportation with a focus on travel demand forecasting, travel behavior and links between land use and transportation. She develops models to forecast the use of different travel modes and vehicle miles traveled (VMT) under changing socio-economic, land-use and built environment scenarios. Her research enables decision makers to develop informed transportation policies and infrastructure decisions, and the results from unique datasets are contributions to the literature. Dr. Akar received her Ph.D. from the University of Maryland, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (2009), with a focus in Transportation. She received her B.Sc. (2002) and M.Sc. (2004) degrees both from the Civil Engineering Department, METU (Turkey).