Nusrat studies how communities that rely on extractive industries, such as those in the coal mining regions of Appalachia, participate in and adapt to the clean energy transition. Her goal is to identify which are the key characteristics of a community that drive its overall resilience to change and how they're interconnected, including individual behaviors, systems of governance, and collective action. Her research builds upon her Ph.D. work at the University of California-Davis, where she studied water management in rural communities in California’s San Joaquin Valley. Nusrat modelled how water stakeholders — from small-scale farmers to industrial agriculture operations — interacted with the policies and institutions that affected their water access. She identified who benefited most from current water governance systems, and who would benefit from a number of proposed alternatives. By expanding her studies from water to energy, she aims to better understand how different types of economic structures and social relationships can lead to more options for community resilience. By providing a more holistic understanding of the feedbacks between individual behavior, societal norms and collective action she aims to help identify a greater range of potential policy interventions, especially bottom-up approaches that encourage more community participation and advance equity and justice.