Sudeshna Kumar

I am a climate-conscious urbanist with a specialization in neighbourhood sustainability assessment employing machine learning techniques such as Bayesian networks. My research focuses on the interplay of climate change, sustainable development, and urbanity hinging on the climate change impacts and exploring the concepts of climate vulnerability, resilience, and adaptation.

I hold a bachelor’s in Architecture from Jadavpur University, India and master's in city planning specialization in integrating transit policies for land use management mitigating climate change in eco-fragile zones, and a Ph.D. in neighborhood sustainability assessment from the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, India. In the formative years of my Ph.D., I was part of a collaborative practicum between DUSP MIT, Boston, USA and IIT Kharagpur, India during Spring 2016-17. The practicum developed a sustainable business model that would provide impetus to the sustainable growth of an underdeveloped region of West Bengal, India, through nurturing a creative economy and enhancing urban equity of a previously ‘no build zone’ in the ‘Khoai’ region of Santiniketan. I secured the EPP Fellowship at Eawag-ETH, Dübendorf, Zurich from September–December 2021.

My academic work looks at the specific dimensions of sustainability both at the micro and meso-urban scales consolidating the aspects of technology and temporal dynamism considering the cross-cutting concepts of vulnerability, resilience and adaptation to climate change. My research interests are socio-environmental systems modelling and developing a knowledge matrix embodying the perspectives of social equity to climate change and participatory approaches within the modelling framework.