Shruti Punjabi

Background & Expertise

Shruti Punjabi is an applied social scientist and urban planner whose work focuses on transdisciplinary collaboration, knowledge integration, stakeholder engagement and environmental decision-making. She earned her PhD in urban and environmental policy and planning from Virginia Tech, where her research examined how scientists, practitioners, and stakeholders integrate diverse forms of knowledge to address complex environmental challenges.

Her work helps technical and cross-functional teams organize and synthesize information, integrate stakeholder perspectives, translate complex findings for technical and non-technical audiences, and develop decision-ready outputs such as briefings, stakeholder summaries, presentations, planning tools and implementation recommendations.

Punjabi brings an interdisciplinary and international perspective shaped by experience across academia, technology, environmental research, and professional practice in both the United States and India. Her work has involved collaboration with researchers, government agencies, practitioners, community stakeholders, and other cross-sector partners on questions at the intersection of science, policy, planning, and public decision-making. At the Institute on the Environment, she builds on this background to support collaborative, stakeholder-engaged approaches to design high-impact decision support tools.