Hello!

Welcome to my website. I am a researcher interested in understanding processes shaping connectivity, distribution and diversity of organisms in their natural habitat using tools from genetics and spatial analysis. In the past I have used invertebrates to ask research questions, as they offer an incredibly diverse and tractable study system to understand ecological and evolutionary processes. I enjoy thinking about natural communities in vast land- and seascapes, making maps, playing with data, coding, and writing.

You can find summaries of these studies in my research page, analytical resources in my code page and popular articles in the writing page.

You can get in touch with me by email at bharti.dharapuram@gmail.com or @BhartiDpuram.

A bit about my research

In my previous work, I studied intertidal snails to understand how environmental gradients and ocean currents shape genetic connectivity and species distribution at the scale of the Indian coastline. This involved extensive fieldwork along the beautiful mainland coast of India and the use of population genetics, species distribution models and ocean flow simulations. This research was a part of my PhD thesis with Prof. Kartik Shanker at the Centre of Ecological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.

I have also studied large-scale patterns of diversity in centipedes, an ancient predatory group of soil arthropods, in the Western Ghats mountains. I was fortunate to carry out field work in its rich forests as a part of a research team surveying soil arthropods. In this stint, I also studied the global patterns in genetic diversity of centipedes and their drivers. These projects involved tools from phylogenetics, population genetics, spatial analysis, and statistics. This postdoctoral research was carried out with Dr. Jahnavi Joshi at the CSIR Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad.