Dr. Sowmya Balachandran is an urban planning scholar who teaches in the Urban Policy and Planning (UPOP) program. She brings over 15 years of professional and research experience in architecture and urban planning, along with extensive leadership and mentoring experiences. Raised in Chennai, India, Sowmya began her professional work in consulting for public institutions on projects involving post tsunami evaluation studies, city level comprehensive plans and strategic plans. Later she co-founded and directed Alchemy Urban Systems, a professional consulting company which specialized in four sectors of work - land use and development planning, post-disaster reconstruction, comprehensive urban mobility planning, and decentralized water resource management. Sowmya also directed an affordable housing company where she set up, the first of its kind housing facilitation center with social impact investment from Dell foundation in Ahmedabad, India.

Sowmya has taught undergraduate and graduate courses on land use planning, planning theory, housing and community development, and community-engaged neighborhood planning at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign and at Florida State University. Sowmya received her doctorate from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign where her research investigated the influence of community nonprofit intermediaries in enabling access to homeownership for historically marginalized and minority families in the Chicago region.