Ru Mehendale is a first year student in the Masters of Science in Transportation program at MIT. Ru is interested in developing innovative methods for using automated urban mobility data to understand travel behavior and effectively deploy operational resources. In particular, her research focuses on data intensive multimodal service planning and network-level analysis with the Chicago Transit Authority.  She is currently developing a visual, interactive tool to help service planners quickly diagnose areas for operational intervention.

Originally from Chicago, IL, Ru holds a Bachelor of Science in Civil Engineering from MIT, where she studied the modeling of vehicle emissions along a high demand transportation corridor in Cambridge, MA. She gained an interest in transportation service planning through her work as an intern with the Service Planning and Infrastructure departments at Transantiago (Santiago, Chile), and her work with Mobilis (Lima, Peru), a non-profit dedicated to promoting sustainable transportation and livable communities. Outside of school, Ru enjoys dancing, figure drawing, and running along the Charles.