Understanding Behaviour was been an extremely successful conference, bringing together a large number of researchers and students interested in behaviour from across the country. It was a three day conference (11th January - 13th January) and brought together about 250 delegates attending more than 30 invited ,contributed and speed talks and a poster session with 71 presenters.

Dr. Raghavendra Gadagkar, from CES, IISc delivered the keynote address. Parallel workshops on Statistical analysis using R, Asking questions in behaviour, Science communication and two early morning bird watching sessions were also conducted during the conference. Renowned wildlife photographer and naturalist, Mr. Dhritiman Mukherjee delivered a special public lecture on the evening of the second day of the conference, to an overflowing auditorium. An engaging panel discussion on “Should behavioural research receive public funding?” stirred up interesting conversations with intriguing opinions.

A workshop for school children from classes VI to VIII was organized as part of this conference, as an outreach event. Students from four local schools participated. There were 225 students, who participated in the “Draw a Scientist” contest sponsored by the Global Young Academy. This was aimed at breaking stereotypes in these young minds, and after having taken a look at the results we received, we would like to believe it achieved success.

The participants registered their feedback, which was very positive. During the feedback session, there was much discussion on the need for such meetings and the participants urged that Understanding Behaviour should be a regular conference. It was suggested that the conference might be organized in alternate years by different institutes across the country.

The Ambassadors of Evolution workshop was proposed with the aim of creating an interest in evolution among students in middle school, who have been introduced to Biology, but are yet to reach the point of no return. The European Society for Evolutionary Biology sanctioned an amount of 1000 euro for this program in September 2016.

Oriental Public School, Kalyani responded to a preliminary query sent out to some of local English medium schools and sent 50 selected students from classes V to VIII, for the workshop, which was convened by Dr. Anindita Bhadra and was successfully conducted by the members of the Behaviour and Ecology Group at IISER Kolkata, along with Dr. Bhadra herself.

During the workshop, attended lectures delivered by biologists from IISER Kolkata and neighbouring institutes, performed a variety of hands-on experiments which were often designed in the form of games and conveyed pertinent evolutionary concepts. This two-day workshop (19th-20th August) culminated in a science fair on 8th September, 2017, where these 50 "Ambassadors" were divided into groups of 4-5 each and put up displays and demonstrations explaining the concepts they had learnt, to their peers at the Oriental Public School.

The themes were highly varied and represented the diversity of concepts that the students had been exposed to. Topics ranged for the evolution of humans to the evolution of different kinds of beaks in birds, the different kinds of hearts in animals to the evolution of horses, evolution of dinosaurs to the demonstration of adaptation following environmental change.