Lakshmi Priya Rajendran is a post-disciplinary social scientist with a background in architecture, urban design and planning. Her teaching and research interests deal with city imaginaries, decoloniality, critical social and digital media, spatial representation and practice, identity negotiations, and cultural encounters in contemporary cities. She is particularly interested in an interdisciplinary understanding of social, spatial, temporal and material practices in cities and a comparative study of these practices in the Global South. Her doctoral research (at Sheffield School of Architecture, University of Sheffield) focused on marginalised migrant communities in Sheffield, examining the significance of the socio-spatial dimension for inclusive urban design. Her research won the International Best PhD Award 2015 from the Society for Research on Identity Formation, US. Lakshmi consistently strives for opportunities that allow her to expand her research interests in interdisciplinary urban studies and to explore approaches within the social sciences, humanities and arts, and engineering, which offer new ways of understanding and studying people and environment interactions globally. This has allowed her to develop a wealth of research methods and interdisciplinary approaches for examining complex and pressing challenges affecting cities today. Lakshmi co-founded and currently directs the Decolab, a women-led, decolonial global collaboratorium fostering disruptive thinking and interdisciplinary learning to forge a more just and equitable future. She is also the Co-chair for the UCL’s Environment Research domain and Academic Co-chair for the UCL Advisory Group on Climate Change and Health.