Surbhi Agrawal holds a Master's degree in City Planning from the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT, a cross-disciplinary program focused on urban design, policy development and systemic interventions.

With her background in architecture and urban design, she used her time at MIT to expand her understanding of the physical fabric, socioeconomic systems and human landscape of cities, especially as they are being transformed through emerging digital technologies and urban informatics. Her 2022 Design Fellowship research focused on these transformations for urban applications from a responsible design and digital equity perspective, especially in developing contexts.

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Surbhi worked with the MIT Senseable City Lab on digital equity in India, towards the creation of a digital inclusion framework. In previous years, she worked with the MIT Civic Data Design Lab and Civic Infrastructure Equity Lab as a researcher and project manager for the Living Data Hubs, a community-based internet network in Nairobi.

Surbhi has worked as a consultant with city governments, urban innovation companies and design agencies across the world, including the San Francisco City Planning Department, LinkNYC in New York, Responsible Sensing Lab in Amsterdam, MIT Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism, MIT City Design and Development Group, RMA Architects in Mumbai, and Vo Trong Nghia Architects in Vietnam.

Her research has been published in several books on built environment studies and she is currently authoring a book on a value-based approach to urban digitization with the Taylor & Francis group.