Sonell Shroff is a project officer at Clean Sky Joint Undertaking. Having completed high school in 2003, Sonell moved to Bangalore to study engineering at MSRIT, VTU.

Sonell oriented herself with a Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering, with internships every semester break in reputed companies and research institutes. She graduated in 2007 and received a Royal Dutch Huygens Scholarship, which brought her to the Delft University of Technology for a Masters course. Here she graduated with a final thesis on the structural analysis of a retrofitted winglet on the Hercules C-130 at Marshall Aerospace in 2009.

Subsequently she started her PhD study, first with CleanEra and then on the ALaSCA project at Delft University of Technology, which she completed in 2014.