Dr. Catherine L. Ross is one of the world’s expert on megaregions—how to bring together regions on transportation, water, energy, land, housing, and health to create great places to live that compete in a global world. She is the director of Georgia Institute of Technology’s Center for Quality Growth and Regional Development (CQGRD) and deputy director of the National Center for Transportation System Productivity and Management. Dr. Ross is vice president of Euquant, Inc., an Atlanta-based economic and planning consulting firm. In July 2009, she was selected to advise the Obama Administration on the first-ever White House Office of Urban Affairs.

She is the editor of Megaregions: Planning for Global Competitiveness (Island Press, 2009) and the co-author of The Inner City: Urban Poverty and Economic Development in the Next Century (1997). Dr. Ross has conducted research on transportation and urban planning and how to make cities, neighborhoods, and regions safer, healthier places for all to live. She has published extensively. Her recent book Health Impact Assessment in the United States was published in 2014 by Springer.

Her research provides solutions to numerous problems including global warming, affordable housing, congestion, job growth in a global economy, air quality and health, and the built environment. Dr. Ross served as the first executive director of the Georgia Regional Transportation Authority (GRTA), an innovative regional state agency created by the Georgia Legislature in 1999 to help counties out-of-compliance with clean air standards by implementing new transportation services and projects. She is a member of the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA) and a former Urban Land Institute Fellow.

As an advance professor at Georgia Institute of Technology, she has been widely recognized for the quality of her work and was the recipient of the “Find the Good and Praise It Award” presented by Secretary of Transportation Rodney Slater for her work on the National Personal Transportation Survey Team.

Dr. Ross served on the Executive Committee of the National Academy of Sciences for the Transportation Research Board and on the board of the Eno Foundation and the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA). She served as a senior policy advisor for the Transportation Research Board of the National Academy of Sciences and has held several other national leadership positions including president of the National Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP). Dr. Ross is also a member of the AAA Auto Club Group Board of Directors and serves on the executive committee and chairs the audit, finance, and ethics committee.

Ross earned bachelor's degrees from Kent State University and a master’s degree and a doctorate in city and regional planning from Cornell University. She completed post-doctorate work at the University of California, Berkeley. She speaks regularly at conferences around the world from Beijing to New Orleans and New York.