Anamika Shreevastava is an Assistant Professor at New York University, jointly appointed in the Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) and the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, where she founds and directs the Urban Planet Lab. Her research examines how growing cities and a changing climate interact as two complex systems, with extreme urban heat as a central problem—asking where heat concentrates within cities, who bears its heaviest burden, and how we can design cooler, more equitable places. To study this, she combines complexity science, high-resolution urban climate modeling, and thermal remote sensing from the ground to space.
Before joining NYU, Anamika was a postdoctoral researcher at Caltech's Center for Science, Society, and Public Policy, where she studied how socioeconomic inequity shapes differential climate impacts, and a NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellow at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where she worked on thermal remote sensing of urban heat and developed a subpixel temperature-detection algorithm for NASA's upcoming Surface Biology and Geology (SBG) mission. Her work on humid and dry heatwaves in Los Angeles was featured by NASA Headquarters as a climate news story of the month.
She earned her Ph.D. and M.S. from Purdue University—her doctoral thesis introduced the concept of fractal intra-urban "heat islets"—and her B.Tech. in Civil Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee. Alongside her research, Anamika is committed to climate adaptation in practice, having partnered with city officials and community organizations in Los Angeles and Olympia, WA on tree planting, cool streets, and heat-mitigation strategies.