Dr. Payan is a Senior Research Engineer at the Aerospace Systems Design Laboratory, Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Since 2019, she is the Georgia Tech Deputy Site Director for the Partnership to Enhance General Aviation Safety, Accessibility, and Sustainability (PEGASAS), a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Center of Excellence for General Aviation.

Over the past years, she has been involved with several aviation safety-related projects such as the development of rotorcraft safety metrics; the use of machine learning and data analytics to develop a database of wires for the prevention of helicopter wire strikes, to study aircraft wheel braking performance for runway safety, to develop a top-down safety risk modeling framework to enhance the FAA integrated safety assessment model (ISAM); the use of large language models to enhance speech-to-text analytics as applied to the study of collision risk in the terminal airspace; the study of scenario-based training as a means to enhance rotorcraft safety; as well as the use of data analytics and machine learning on large commercial airline datasets. She has also been involved in the design and optimization of systems-of-systems, large scale optimization of flight schedules and commodities networks, the implementation of electric propulsion alternatives to existing aircraft, and the development of a framework to allocate UAVs to various imaging missions, among other topics.

She has been passionate about aeronautics and aerospace from a very young age and earned her private pilot license in June 2015 through the Yellow Jacket Flying Club at Georgia Tech.