Hello there!!

Glad to see you here. I am a researcher in the school of evolutionary thinking. My research interest spans Coevolution, Molecular Ecology, and Wolbachia biology. I employ laboratory experiments and high-throughput genomic information to gain insights into trait evolution in insect taxa and decipher the intriguing ecology of Wolbachia-mediated reproductive parasitism in insect hosts. Using comparative genomics, I investigate the ways populations respond to their environment, and how distinct ecological events such as bottleneck, migration, and drift influence population resilience.

Currently, I work as a Faculty Fellow at CSIR-CCMB, where I lead a DST-INSPIRE funded project to unravel the effect of historical bottleneck on contemporary population structure in the biocontrol species Zygogramma bicolorata. The project is relevant to decipher potential strategies to improve the ecological resilience of bottleneck population in general and that of the biocontrol agent, in particular.

Previously, I have spent a year and half at IISER-BPR, as a Postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Bodhisatta Nandy exploring different research questions in the same beetle species. Working with undergraduate and new PhD students, we developed conducted pilot projects on the reproductive biology, chemical ecology of the beetle, and the community-level interaction of this species with other co-inhabiting insects like ants and mealybugs. Prior to this, during my PhD dissertation with Dr. Ullasa Kodandaramaiah at IISER-TVM, I worked with different lepidopteran taxa to understand their evolutionary histories in relation to past ecological events under the frameworks of molecular phylogenetics and phylogeography.