Shalini Misra

Shalini Misra is a Professor in Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning in the School of Public and International Affairs at Virginia Tech in Arlington, Virginia, where she founded and directs the Public Interest Technology Lab and serves as Virginia Tech's designee to the Public Interest Technology - University Network. Her research examines how people think, decide, and collaborate in the context of environmental change and digital technology. She studies the psychological and social dimensions of team science and convergence research, the governance of freshwater systems, and the use of artificial intelligence in public management. Her early work on face-to-face conversation and mobile phone use, known as the iPhone Effect study, remains widely cited in media psychology and technology studies.

Her work has appeared in Communications Earth & Environment, Government Information Quarterly, Environment and Behavior, American Psychologist, Technology in Society, Perspectives on Public Management and Governance, American Journal of Preventive Medicine, and International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, among others, and has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Misra's current projects include a Destination Areas 2.0 project studying the impact of AI tools on public managerial thinking and decision-making, and a long-running, NSF-funded collaboration on salinization in the Occoquan Reservoir that examines how stakeholders perceive and respond to environmental risk. She holds a PhD in Planning, Policy, and Design from the University of California, Irvine, an MS in Sustainable Resource Management from the Technical University of Munich, and a BE in Civil Engineering from Gujarat University. Her work bridges environmental psychology, social ecology, science and technology studies, team science, and public policy, with the aim of putting research in service of the public interest.

Areas of Expertise

• Digital technologies and Artificial Intelligence
• Technology and Public Policy
• Science of team science, inter- and trans-disciplinary research
• convergence research
• Public Interest Technology
• Thinking, decision-making, interpersonal relationships
• Sustainability
• Social Ecology
• Environmental and 
• Social Psychology