Parul graduated with a Master’s in Urban Planning from the University of Illinois in 2004 and joined LEAM in 2005, working primarily on building a social model for the St. Louis metropolitan region. In addition, Parul works on economic sub-models for Fort Benning and Fort Bragg as a part of the Strategic Sustainability Assessment project.

Parul’s undergraduate degree is in architecture from the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi, India in 1999. Prior to joining the program at University of Illinois she worked as an architect-planner in Ahmedabad, India, including significant planning experience working on post-earthquake recovery in the historic city of Bhuj, India. This project involved participatory planning and scenario-building in devastated circumstances and motivated Parul to focus her academic research on community perspectives to development issues and heritage planning.

In 2004, Parul undertook a semester of research at the University of Groningen, Netherlands looking extensively at the dynamics of heritage and conservation planning in a western European context, resulting in a capstone paper titled “Historic Conservation in the Netherlands: Frameworks, Strategies and Impacts”.

In her free time, Parul loves to travel (accompanied with visual documentation), read fiction, swim and relax.