Melissa Smith co-founded BandukSmith Studio in 2011, and is the Program Chair for the Bachelor of Urban Design program at CEPT University, Ahmedabad, where teaches in the school’s Architecture and Planning faculties. Her interests, explored through the investigation of the incremental, unplanned transformation of aging modernist planned cities, and continued through the examination of settlement formation in India, follow how inhabitants tend to restructure their built environments over time, with an eye toward how these unplanned, recurring interventions could inform design processes for the public realm. Smith received her Master of Architecture and Master of City & Regional Planning degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, and received her BA with concentrations in German, Asian Studies and Art History from Calvin College, Michigan.