Virajitha Chimalapati is a Senior Research Analyst within the Urban Development Team of the Sustainable Cities and Transport program at WRI India. She is based in Bhubaneswar, Odisha where she serves as a city anchor for the Health City for Adolescents (HCA) project, focusing on developing frameworks, stakeholder consultation, partner and community engagement to create safe, healthy, vibrant and accessible public spaces for adolescents.

Virajitha has worked on diverse projects encompassing oral history, heritage and urban conservation, community participation and engagement, disaster risk mitigation and management in historic urban areas, policy evaluation and operationalization in diverse geographic and socio-economic contexts across South Asia. She also ran her studio PRAVARA, with a focus on contemporary application of traditional knowledge systems and technologies, and on evolving culture-led, people centric urban transformations.

Virajitha holds a master’s in Architectural Conservation from the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi and a bachelor’s degree in Architecture from Anna University. She is currently pursuing a PhD from the University of York, where her research focuses on developing a roadmap for co-creating a culture-based climate change policy and the possibilities offered by e-governance and digital governance mechanisms, within urban regions of South Asia. Virajitha is an avid reader, a bibliophile and a coffee lover.