Assistant Curator, Museum of Paleontology; Assistant Professor, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.
About
Academic background
I received my B.Sc. in Physics and Biology from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore in 2017, and a Ph.D. in Biological Sciences from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2022. After my doctorate, I had a joint appointment as a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and a James S. McDonnell Foundation (JSMF) Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology of Harvard University. I joined the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in January 2025.
Research Interests
I am interested in understanding how abiotic and biotic interactions structure individuals, species, communities, and ecosystems across different spatiotemporal scales, and to explore these questions through a combination of comparative- and trait-based approaches, ecological and paleontological fieldwork, the use of natural history collections, theoretical models, and data-driven methods. My past work has spanned different levels of biological organization, and ecological and evolutionary timescales, and I hope to continue to use biological interactions as a lens by which to investigate key themes in evolution, ecology, and behavior.
Some of the major questions in my research include:
1. How do distributions of ecological communities respond to global change?
2. How are ecological interactions shaped by the environment and eco-evolutionary histories?
3. How do evolutionary, ecological and behavioral innovations arise in organisms?
A few focal systems in my work include: (1) plants, insects and their interactions; (2) planktic foraminiferal ecology; (3) microbial community ecology; (4) ecological networks and complex systems. However, we are interested in general biodiversity informatics across all scales: from individual specimens and species to ecosystem-level dynamics.
My lab will be looking for new graduate students and postdocs for Fall 2025. Interested students and researchers should contact me through email.
