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I am a DBT/Wellcome Trust India Alliance Early Career Fellow and the PI of Integrative Genetics and Evolution Laboratory (IGEL) at the Department of Biology, Ashoka University, India. I am broadly interested in investigating the ecological and evolutionary dynamics at the organismal and sub-organismal level in spatially structured and unstructured populations. My current work involves characterizing the consequences of dietary mismatches, and understanding their impacts on different disease phenotypes.

Prior to this, I served as a B4 postdoctoral fellow and worked with Prof. Michael M. Desai at the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University. During this period, I investigated the genetic basis of differential spontaneous whole-genome duplication in evolving budding yeast populations.

Before joining Harvard, I had completed my doctoral studies at Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research (IISER)-Pune under the supervision of Prof. Sutirth Dey at Population Biology Laboratory (PBL), which was followed by a brief stint of research associateship in the same lab. Here I had theoretically and empirically investigated different control methods for stabilizing extinction-prone populations. I had also studied dispersal evolution and its correlated changes in life-history, behaviour and metabolism. I showed that dispersal evolution can make organisms more active, exploratory and aggressive, which can have serious consequences for species invasive potential and ecosystem stability. Find some of the snaps and videos of our Drosophila-dispersal setup here.

Overall, I am broadly interested in understanding the ecological and evolutionary dynamics of spatially structured and unstructured populations and discovering the resulting life-history, behavioural and genetic changes occurring in those populations. I am equally interested in laboratory experiments and computational approaches to tackle research problems. A detailed description of my previous research and the references for the publications documenting the findings can be found here.

Apart from academia, I like to go for trekking. You can find some photos of my past trek trips here.

My another pass-time is to read about Python and make code snippets mostly for fun. You can find some of the more useful ones in My code-bits page.

Cooking and good food (not necessarily causally related to each other) have a rather therapeutic effect on me to cope with the rough edges of life.

The contact page contains my current address.

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