Prior to that, she was an Assistant Professor in International Development at the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University, and served as a Postdoctoral Scholar at Columbia Law School’s Center on Global Legal Transformations. Balakrishnan has also worked as an urban planner in the United States, India, and the United Arab Emirates, and as a consultant to the UN-HABITAT in Nairobi, Kenya; and has served as a Research Fellow at the Land Governance Laboratory (LGLab), a Cambridge-based not-for-profit organization, which studies and disseminates tools for inclusive land resource allocation in rapidly urbanizing countries.