Chris Zegras

Zegras is Professor of Mobility and Urban Planning and the current Department Head of DUSP. He has taught planning methods and techniques, integrated land use-transportation planning, quantitative methods, and transportation finance. He has also co-taught urban planning and design studios in Beijing, Boston, Cartagena (Colombia), Guadalajara (Mexico), Mexico City, and Santiago de Chile. For 10+ years he served on the Executive Board of the BRT+ Centre of Excellence and the International Scientific Committee for the Center for Sustainable Urban Development (Centro de Desarrollo Urbano Sustentable, CEDEUS). From 2015-2020 he was the Lead Principal Investigator for the Future Urban Mobility interdisciplinary research group, sponsored by the Singapore MIT Alliance for Research and Technology. From 2007 to 2016 he was Transportation Systems Focus Area Lead for the MIT Portugal Program.

His research has historically spanned inter-related areas critical to tackling metropolitan mobility challenges: human behavior, digital transformation, and strategic planning techniques and technologies. While serving as Department Head, he intentionally "downsized" his research portfolio, but recent projects have examined individuals' perceptions of different urban mobility infrastructures and the political economy of streetscape transformations in Cambridge (MA). Most recently, he has been working together with the Mattapan Food and Fitness Coalition's Vigorous Youth Program on a youth participatory action research project focused on bus reliability. 

He has consulted widely for a diverse range of governments, inter-governmental organizations, and nongovernmental organizations. Prior to becoming a Professor, he worked for the International Institute for Energy Conservation in Washington, DC and Santiago de Chile and for MIT’s Laboratory for Energy and the Environment. Zegras holds a BA in Economics and Spanish from Tufts University, a Master in City Planning and a Master of Science in Transportation from MIT and a PhD in Urban and Regional Planning, also from MIT.