Shruti Syal holds a BSc in Biology from McGill University, a MSc in Environmental Studies from The Energy & Resources Institute, and a PhD in Regional Planning from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. A mixed methods researcher, she studies cities as human-environment systems. She integrates the conceptual frameworks of Social-Ecological Systems, Complex Adaptive Systems, Actor Network Theory, and Social Network Analysis to study water/waste dynamics as they relate to infrastructure access in “informal” spaces.