Gauri Nagpal

Gauri Nagpal is a doctoral candidate in City and Regional Planning, focusing on climate action, governance, and informality in the Global South. Her research explores how resilience strategies evolve when informality is recognized as a key framework shaping urban development. She also focuses on planning climate action among stakeholders such as development banks and multilateral institutions and their interactions with nation-states.

Before beginning her Ph.D. at Cornell, Gauri worked with International Programs at the Ford Foundation, where she tracked global grants and built relationships with high-level government officials and international organizations to scale the foundation’s initiatives. She also consults with the World Bank Group’s Global Facility for Disaster Risk Reduction, supporting risk-informed land-use planning to enhance city resilience.

Gauri has been involved in research with institutions such as the Bloomberg Center for Cities, the Center for International Development at the Harvard Kennedy School, Rio de Janeiro’s Secretariat for Urbanism, Infrastructure and Housing, the Hungry Cities Partnership, and the Indian Institute for Human Settlements. She is also the founder of an initiative providing affordable electric vehicles tailored for urban informal workers in Indian cities.

She holds dual master’s degrees in Urban Planning and Design Studies from Harvard University and a fellowship in Urbanism from the Indian Institute for Human Settlements.