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I am a PhD student in Medical Sciences, co-supervised by Amy Orben and Nikhil Chaudhary at the University of Cambridge. My research is (largely) inspired from the following observation: Our contemporary industrialised environments are strange and fascinating. Strange, in that certain lifestyle features today are drastically different from those hypothesised to characterise our evolutionary history (e.g. infant caregiving carried out mostly by mothers v/s by a range of individuals). These differences might leave some more vulnerable to mental health problems (Chaudhary & Salali, 2022; see Table 1 in Katiyar et al., 2025).
Fascinating, in that despite these strange environmental features, humans are extremely flexible & capable of creating a wide range of cultural practices & technologies that give rise to novel, potentially therapeutic, behaviours (e.g. narrating stories via motion pictures, reels and OTT platforms; maintaining friendships in digital environments).
Drawing insights from across the behavioural and evolutionary sciences, my research program investigates how our contemporary living conditions both protect from and/or lead to mental health problems in novel ways. Current questions of interest include, but aren't limited to:
(a) Why do people self-diagnose themselves with various mental health conditions? What is the role of social media here?
(b) What are the determinants of mental health in small-scale societies?
(c) What are the diverse ways in which societies conceptualize mental health?
(d) What practical benefits does evolutionary psychiatry offer to the broader public and everyday therapeutic practice?
Below is a select list of relevant publications/pre-prints:
Katiyar, T.*, Hunt, A.*, Orben, A., Chaudhary, N., Jaeggi, A., Digital Technologies & Evolutionary Mismatch: Harming, But Also Healing Mental Health Psychological Review (2025)
Hunt, A.*, Carpenter, T.*, Katiyar, T., ....., Jaeggi, A., Clinicians’ attitudes to evolutionary and genetic explanations for anxiety: a cluster-randomised study of stigmatisation PsyArXiv (2025)
Turner, G., Ferguson, A., Katiyar, T., Palminteri, S., Orben, A., Old Strategies, New Environments: Reinforcement Learning on Social Media Biological Psychiatry (2025)
Podcast Appearance summarising some of my research interests
bio.
I am trained in several disciplinary approaches investigating the nature of human behaviour and institutions. Initially, I studied economics and international relations at the School of Liberal Studies, PDEU. Subsequently, I was awarded the Young India Fellowship (YIF) at Ashoka University where a key moment of my life transpired.
That is, I learnt the important skill of cross-fertilising ideas from several disciplinary traditions. As a consequence, my 'adolescent' fascination with novel technologies and its societal & psychological implications finally found diverse academic literatures to express itself.
Amidst this reborn fascination, I also realised that the process of idea cross-fertilisation gave me immense joy as it allowed me to read freely in my daily life. Hence, I started foraging for a disciplinary home which shared an interest in investigating technology and didn't confine its student in a monogamous reading marriage with its specific literature. In this quest, I discovered cognitive science -- the liberal arts of the sciences.
This led me to start my MSc. research training in cognitive science at the École normale supérieure in Paris (ENS-PSL). During my three years at the ENS, I had the privilege of exploring the entire breadth of sub-disciplines that cognitive science had to offer with some amazing mentors and researchers. In this research voyage, two fields found a special place in my heart - evolutionary psychiatry and anthropology (see MAPPING Mental Health).
What attracted me to these fields was their potential to provide refreshing perspectives + insights on widespread public health issues that many think are caused by social media and smartphones.
To manifest this potential, I decided to pursue an interdisciplinary PhD in Medical Sciences at the University of Cambridge. Here, I divide my time between two departments (and two brilliant & kind supervisors + lab mates):
(a) MRC Cognition & Brain Sciences Unit
(b) Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies
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