Georgia Tech's Adair Garrett Focuses on Transportation Asset Management
Adair's research focuses on rail and transit infrastructure resilience and adaptation
Congratulations to the NCST's 2025 Student of the Year, Adair Garrett!
Meet Adair Garrett, a Ph.D. candidate in Transportation Systems Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). She is currently pursuing a master’s degree in city and regional planning alongside her doctoral studies. Her research focuses on transportation asset management, with an emphasis on rail and transit infrastructure resilience and adaptation.
Adair’s interests in transportation systems, which include infrastructure asset management, education, planning, and performance and reliability, are rooted in her lived experiences. She grew up in Greenville, Alabama before moving to Atlanta, Georgia, where she spent more than a decade navigating the city without a car. Relying on walking, biking, and public transit for daily travel, Adair experienced firsthand how uneven sidewalks, unreliable bus service, and unsafe bike infrastructure can discourage the use of active and public transportation and diminish quality of life. Her encounters with transportation systems of varying quality sparked a growing curiosity about the design, planning, and management decisions that shape mobility, ultimately inspiring her to pursue a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering with a focus on transportation at Georgia Tech.
During her undergraduate studies at Georgia Tech, Adair began translating this curiosity into technical training in transportation engineering. Concurrently, she worked part time at the Center for Serve-Learn Sustain (now the Center for Sustainable Communities Research and Education) to support educational interventions that advance local implementation of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. After earning her bachelor’s degree, she gained professional experience through internships at transportation consulting firms, designing road and intersection alignments, assisting with corridor studies, and supporting environmental assessments for major transportation projects across the Southeast. Seeking a deeper, systems-level understanding, she returned to Georgia Tech to pursue graduate studies in transportation systems engineering with Dr. Adjo Amekudzi-Kennedy in the Infrastructure Research Group. After successfully defending her master’s thesis in Spring 2023, Adair transitioned into the doctoral program to continue her research under the same advisor.
In her Ph.D. research, Adair develops and applies metrics to measure system resilience, analyzes international examples of successful rail system adaptations, and prepares open-access tools for those interested in rail infrastructure asset management. Her research projects provide practical tools and insights that help practitioners and decision-makers improve the reliability of rail and transit networks for the communities that rely on them. Across these projects, she mentors talented undergraduate and graduate students to contribute to the research while identifying and advancing new research topics aligned with their own areas of interest.
In addition to her research, Adair enjoys instructing engineering and asset management courses. She has taught Civil and Environmental Engineering Systems, an undergraduate course covering systems analysis and engineering economy, where she integrated interactive activities to enhance student engagement. She has also instructed Infrastructure Systems, a graduate-level course which most recently included a rail-specific asset management module she developed. Outside of the classroom, Adair is an active member of the Atlanta and Georgia Tech chapters of Women’s Transportation Seminar (WTS) as well as the Transportation Research Board Standing Committee on Regional Intercity Passenger Rail Transportation (TRB AR011).
Adair’s work has been recognized through numerous awards and fellowships, including the NCST Outstanding Student of the Year Award (2025), the USDOT Dwight D. Eisenhower Transportation Fellowship Program, the Georgia Institute of Transportation Engineers Scholarship, the WTS Helene M. Overly Memorial Scholarship, and Georgia Engineering Foundation Scholarships. She has also received two NCST dissertation grants to support her research on transportation resilience.
Looking ahead, Adair hopes to leverage her research, teaching, and service to support the development of reliable and adaptive transportation systems.
Congratulations on your achievements, Adair!