Sonali Wadhwa, Ph.D.

Visiting Scholar, Digital Collaboration in the Pandemic Era

Sonali has joined CADRE as a visiting scholar to examine how the pandemic has forced us to embrace a paradigm shift in the way we work. Her current research is focused on exploring different modes of design collaboration, identifying digital tools that enhance the distributed design process as well as highlight limitations of the current technology and issues of digital equity in the designer workforce.

Sonali holds a Ph.D. in Architectural Engineering and an M.S. degree in Architecture from Penn State University. For her doctoral thesis, she developed an interactive virtual prototyping system that elicits end user feedback through a role-based design review approach that enables specific task-based scenarios to be performed in a dynamic digital prototype.

Sonali’s passion is to understand how digital tools shape design thinking and the collaborative design process and her research interests include design visualization, applications of virtual and augmented reality in design, building information modeling and evidence-based design for healthcare facilities.

For the last seven years, Sonali has been working in healthcare design consulting where she has led BIM processes for medical equipment planning and developed interactive virtual prototypes for design review of facilities to support wayfinding, mock operations, and training. She has extensive experience working in the AEC industry on BIM workflows with a focus on interoperability issues.