Gayatri “Gaya” Umashankar is a Regional Manager at Digital Building Components (DBC), part of DPR Construction, and a practitioner and researcher advancing prefabrication, industrialized construction, and building-system innovation. Trained as an architect, Gaya has built her career at the intersection of design, construction, and manufacturing, progressing through product development, project engineering, project management, and regional leadership roles. Her work focuses on advancing the adoption and scalability of prefabricated building systems by identifying appropriate applications, developing repeatable solutions, and translating coordinated digital models into factory-produced building components for complex healthcare, mission-critical, and other high-performance projects.

As a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Offsite Construction (CfOC), Gaya contributes industry-based research addressing the technical, organizational, and commercial barriers that have historically limited the broader adoption of offsite and industrialized construction. Her research and industry contributions focus on moving prefabrication beyond project-specific solutions toward repeatable building products, standardized interfaces, and scalable systems that can be applied across projects and organizations. She has contributed to the development of product catalogs, system interfaces, and emerging standards for prefabricated exterior wall systems, with a focus on improving consistency, interoperability, and integration across design, manufacturing, and field installation.

Gaya also contributes to advancing the connection between industrialized construction and sustainability. Her work includes Product Catalog Report (PCR) standards, life-cycle assessment (LCA), Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) and embodied-carbon studies for prefabricated building systems. Through this work, she helps develop more transparent methods for evaluating the environmental performance of prefabricated construction and identifying opportunities to reduce embodied carbon across the building-product lifecycle.

Gaya is an active speaker, educator, and industry contributor on prefabrication, industrialized construction, building-system standardization, and sustainable construction. Her work has been recognized through the 2024 Advancing Prefabrication Individual Contributor Rising Star of the Year award and her selection as one of ENR Mountain States & Southwest’s 2026 Top Young Professionals. These recognitions reflect her contributions to advancing the adoption and understanding of prefabrication within the construction industry. Gaya holds a Master of Science in Construction Management from Arizona State University and a Bachelor of Architecture from Anna University in Chennai, India.