Vivek Jadhav — a final year PhD student from our lab — has been awarded the prestigious 2026 Schmidt Science Fellowship!
Vivek is the first from IISc to win this award. The award includes a generous fellowship for postdoctoral research in the US in an interdisciplinary field different from his PhD program.
Hearty Congratulations to Vivek! He has recently finished his Thesis Colloquium and is all set to submit his thesis soon!
PhD Student Jahanvi Tiwari presented her ongoing PhD thesis work on mixed-species schooling at an EMBL Symposium, Collectivity in living systems: emergence, function, and evolution, at Heidelberg, Germany; and at the Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour, Konstanz, Max Plank Institute at Konstanz!
Prof Philip Maini, the director of Wolfson Centre for Mathematical Biology, Oxford University visited our lab on 7th April 2025. He is currently on a visiting professorship to the Department of BioEngineering, IISc.
Various PhD and Undergrad students from the lab presented their research work, had engaging conversations and got insightful feedback on the ongoing work in our lab.
We went on a lab trip to see the amazing semi-arid landscapes towards Ramanagara, a little south west of Bengaluru.
Lab Members in the image, from back to front; L to R: Swastik, Yogesh, Vivek; Amar, Shuaib, Juee, Lamshana, Niharika; Arshed, Aparna, Arya, Jahanvi, Aakriti, Harsh; finally me taking the selfie!).
More pictures below!
I really enjoyed two weeks of amazing line of spakers and talks at Decision, Games and Evolution at ICTS-TIFR Bengaluru! The workshop had many pedagogical talks at an advanced level, covering state of the art in this highly inter-disciplinary field. Met many highly motivated masters and phd students!
I gave a talk on Eco-evolutionary dynamics in finite populations, based on recent Am Nat paper by Shikhara.
The workshop was organised by Sagar Chakraborty (IIT Kanpur, India), Supratim Sengupta (IISER Kolkata, India), Sandeep Krishna (NCBS, India) and myself.
Vivek Hari Sridhar, @vivekhsridhar , a postdoc from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behaviour, soon joining the faculty of Department of Biology at the University of Washington, Seattle, USA gave an excellent talk at CES on integrating neuronal behaviour to the individual to the collective animal motion!
We have been interacting with Vivek since his first year of PhD, when he worked with Iain Couzin. It was nice to see his years of work shaping up with such novel insights. For his postdoctoral work, we began a collaboration (along with Akanksha Rathore, Hemal Naik, and Meg Crofoot) to study the spatial dynamics of lekking. We are excited about various upcoming work and continued collaborations!
Check his webpage for more details of Vivek’s work!
There was an excellent two-week Winter School jointly organised by ICTP-ICTS on Quantitative Systems Biology — with a focus on ecological systems. I was one of the lecturers, and I spoke about the role of stochasticity and how it can lead to surprising outcomes.
Our lab was well represented, with about six people (including PhD and undergrads) attending the school. I also met some fantastic theoretical ecologists who gave talks. Notably, Priyanga Amarasekara accepted my invitation to visit our lab and IISc campus. Had a great time interacting with Priyanga!
Hearty Congratulations to Jaideep Joshi, our lab’s first PhD student, who joined as an Assistant Professor at the Centre for Climate Studies at IIT Bombay (his UG alma matter)!
Jaideep comes from an Electrical Engineering background, with BTech from IIT Bombay. He then got interested in ecology and joined our lab in 2012 as a PhD student (I joined CES in 2011; one more student, Sabiha Sachdeva, an Integrated PhD student from Physics joined our lab roughly around the same time; she was codvised by Prof Sriram Ramaswamy from Physics).
Jaideep worked on the evolution of cooperation in our lab before moving to various positions in Europe for postdoctoral work on eco-evolutionary plant trait and forest dynamics. You can check his Google Scholar page here.
Wishing Jaideep all the best in his new role!
(Thibaut is first from left in this image)
Hearty Congratulations to Dr Thibaut de Pirey , who has joined a permanent scientist position at the Institut de Physique Théorique (Institute for Theoretical Physics), Saclay, France!
Thibaut was an IISc Raman Postdoctoral Fellow with our lab, collaborating with Prof Sriram Ramaswamy from the Department of Physics at IISc. He worked on statistical mechanics of pattern formation in ecological systems, developing a through mathematically rigorous theory — which is our joint work in progress.
You can check more work of Thibaut on his Google Scholar Page!
All the best to Thibaut, and we hope to continue exciting our collaboration with you!
(Archan is second from left in the photo above).
Congratulations to Dr Archan Mukhopadhyay, a SERB NPDF postdoctoral fellow in our lab who has just joined the Department of Physics, M. S. Ramaiah University of Applied Sciences, as an Assistant Professor.
Archan has been working with us and in collaboration with folks at NIMHANS on analysing collective cell migration data in the context of patient derived and control cell lines. Archan did his PhD from IIT Kanpur and had a brief stint of postdoc at UK, before joining our lab in September 2023.
On behalf of everyone in the lab, I wish Archan a fulfilling new role as a faculty member. Wishing that he will reach great heights!
Theoretical Ecology and Evolution Laboratory 