UG Alumni

“UG Alumni” are those who spend at least 6 months in the lab, typically working on their final year undergraduate/masters thesis.

UG (BS/MS Thesis) 2022-23

Apuroopa Sreeyapu Reddy, IISc (MS; Bio Major): Effect of boundary conditions on Vicsek and modified Vicsek models of collective motion

Chandan Relekar, IISc (BS; Physics Major): Patterns and dynamics in models of ecological systems.

Ashish Eradath, IISER Behrampur (BS-MS; Bio Major): Quantifying patterns of semi-arid vegeation.

Akshay Sanjeev, IISER Kolkata (BS-MS; Bio Major): Experiments to test the effect of boundary conditions on data-derived models collective motion

Shikhara Bhat, IISER-Pune (BS-MS; Biology Major): Finite-size stochasticity in fundamental evolutionary theorems. Check more about his work on his webpage: https://thepandalorian.github.io/

Publication from Thesis Work:

Shikhara Ananda Bhat and Vishwesha Guttal, Eco-evolutionary dynamics for finite populations and the noise-induced reversal of selection. In Review. 

Jyothsna, Dayanand Sagar University (MSc): (March 2023-July 2023). On vegetation dynamics. 

UG (BS/MS Thesis) 2021-22

Ashrit Mangalwedhekar, a Biomedical engineering MTech from IIT Ropar, did his MTech thesis working on experiments and modelling of schooling fish.

He joins Max Planck Institute of Animal Behaviour in Konstanz, Germany for his PhD in Sept 2022.

Bhavya Deepti Vadavalli, a BS-MS (major biology) from IISER Mohali, worked closely with Dr Akanksha Rathore on analysing blackbuck herd data.

She joins the Department of Anthropology (Biological Anthropology) at Boston University, in Sept 2022, for her PhD! 

Dharanish R, BSc-MS student majoring in Physics from IISc, worked on trait variation and demographic noise in savanna forest transitions. He worked with PhD student Tanveen Kaur Randhawa.

In Sept 2022, he will be joining Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, Germany for his PhD! 

Shreesh Meghana Kulkarni, a BS-BTech dual degree (Physics and CS) student from BITS Pilani, worked on tracking schooling fish. 

Pritha Kundu studied Zoology at Presidency University (Kolkata), and Evolutionary Biology at Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (Bangalore) before joining the lab as a PhD student.  She joined our lab in Aug 2019 and graduated with an MSc thesis, working on “Effect of Boundary Conditions on Collective Movement of Animal Groups” in Jan 2022. She is currently a freelancer, working on many projects. Her non-academic interests include photography, dance, and martial arts. 

UG (BS/MS Thesis)2020-21

Koustav Halder: Koustav did his final year thesis working on clustering, percolation and vegetation dynamics — working closely with a phd student Ayan Das. He was a BS-MS student from IISER Pune and joined Rutgers for PhD in August 2021! 

Sainmitre Passah, MSc student in Biology from IISc, did his thesis work on tracking blackbuck herds. He worked on datasets of PhD student Akanksha Rathore. 

UG (BS/MS Thesis) 2019-20

Ayan Das was a biology undergrad from IISc (BSc Research program) and did his MS thesis project, working on Vegetation dynamics in semi-arid ecosystems.  

Sabiha Majumder, Ayan Das, Appilineni Kushal, Sumithra Sankaran, and Vishwesha Guttal, 2021, “Finite-size effects, demographic noise, and ecosystem dynamics.” The European Physical Journal Special Topics, doi: https://doi.org/10.1140/epjs/s11734-021-00184-z, PDF

Vivek Jhadav (IISER, Mohali, Physics, BS-MS) – worked on data-driven spatial models of collective behaviour with PhD student Jitesh Jhadav and Danny Raj (INSPIRE-faculty from Chemical Engineering, IISc). He joined our own lab in Feb 2021 for his PhD!  

Vivek Jadhav, Vishwesha Guttal and Danny Raj M “Randomness in the choice of neighbours promotes cohesion in mobile animal groups.” 2022. Royal Society Open Science, Vol 9: DOI: https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.220124

Iyer, Priya, Abhishek Shukla, Vivek Jadhav, and Bikash Kumar Sahoo. “Anisogamy selects for male‐biased care in self‐consistent games with synchronous matings.” Evolution 74, no. 6 (2020): 1018-1032.https://doi.org/10.1111/evo.13969

UG (BS/MS Thesis) 2018-19

Ayan Das was a biology undergrad from IISc (BSc Research program) and did his final year BS thesis project, working on Vegetation patterns in semi-arid ecosystems.  

Sabyasachi Basu was a math undergrad from IISc (BSc Research program) and did his final year BS thesis project, jointly with Prof Srikanth Iyer of Mathematics department. He worked on developing a new herding model.  Sabyasachi joined UCSF for a graduate program in computer science. 

Abhratanu Saha was a math undergrad from IISc (BSc Research program) and did his final year BS thesis project, jointly with Prof Srikanth Iyer of Mathematics department. He worked on analysing a series of collective decision-making models using analytical techniques like Fokker-Planck equation and Chemical Langevin equation. He joined Univ of Florida for graduate school in fall 2020. 

Bikash Kumar Sahoo was a MSc student (major Biology) from IISc. He worked with Priya Iyer, an independent DST postdoc fellow in our lab, on the role of sexual section in parental care. 

Iyer, Priya, Abhishek Shukla, Vivek Jadhav, and Bikash Kumar Sahoo. “Anisogamy selects for male‐biased care in self‐consistent games with synchronous matings.” Evolution 74, no. 6 (2020): 1018-1032.https://doi.org/10.1111/evo.13969

Saarthak Shetty was a B.Tech student from RVCE (Mechanical engineering), Bengaluru. He worked on building collective behaviour inspired autonomous robots, jointly with Prof Debasis Ghose of Aerospace department. He subsequently joined the lab of Prof Ghose for a project assistant position and then in 2020 fall he joined the graduate school at CMU on Robotics. 

Shetty, Sarthak J., and Vijay Ramesh. “pyResearchInsights—An open‐source Python package for scientific text analysis.” Ecology and Evolution (2021). https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.8098

UG (BS/MS Thesis) 2017-18

Prashastha Mishra was an undergrad from IISER-Pune and did her final year project in our lab. She’s broadly interested in the fields of ecology and evolution, particularly fascinated by problems in theoretical ecology. She worked on remotely-sensed data to predict changes in vegetation patterns in the tropics. She was mentored by Dr Krishnapriya Tamma – a postdoc in the lab. She joined the EEB PhD program in University of Toronto in Fall 2019! 

Krishnapriya Tamma, Prashastha Mishra, Vishwesha Guttal, 2019, Human dominated regions and bimodality in forest biomes, In Preparation.

Gokul Nair: Gokul did his undergraduate degree from Physics department of IISc. He did his internship in summer 2015 and then continued to work, during his spare time, on models of collective behaviours. His work, which is a follow up of another UG student Athmanathan Senthilnathan, has led to the following publication — the first model on fission-fusion dynamic model of heterogeneous flocks with interesting predictions. Gokul joined the Centre for Applied Mathematics PhD program at Cornell University in Fall 2019. 

Publication arising from his internship:

Gokul Nair, Athmanathan Senthilnathan, Srikanth Iyer, and Vishwesha Guttal, 2019, Fission-fusion dynamics and group-size dependent composition in heterogeneous populations, Physical Review E, 99, 032412, doi: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.99.032412  arXiv:1711.06882 [nlin.AO],  Dataand codes,  Download PDF

UG (BS/MS Thesis) 2016-17

Kushal Appilineni did his final year Physics project with our lab. He worked with PhD students Sabiha Majumder and Sumithra Sankaran on analytically solving a 1-dimensional model of vegetation dynamics with positive feedbacks. He loves studying and solving problems arising in the intersection of physics and other fields like biology, atmospheric sciences, economics etc. I find it quite fascinating how complex systems in these contrasting disciplines work on very similar underlying principles. He also plays and composes music, “expressing different experiences in life through it.” 

Kushal joined Prof Shashi Thutupalli’s lab at NCBS for his masters project in 2017. He joined the Applied Mathematic PhD program at UC Davis in 2019. 

Sabiha Majumder, Ayan Das, Appilineni Kushal, Sumithra Sankaran, and Vishwesha Guttal, 2021, “Finite-size effects, demographic noise, and ecosystem dynamics.” The European Physical Journal Special Topics, doi: https://doi.org/10.1140/epjs/s11734-021-00184-z, PDF

Aakash Sengupta joined our lab for the second year project of his Int Ph.D course and worked on collective animal behaviour. He completed his MS thesis on “Transitions in Collective Behavioural States in Animal Groups” in Dec 2016.

UG (BS/MS Thesis) 2015-16

Tapan Goel completed his undergraduate at IISc majoring in physics with a minor in Biology. He did his final year project on analysing schooling dynamics of fish.

After completing his project at our lab, Tapan joined QBio PhD program UCSD, USA.

UG (BS/MS Thesis) 2014-15

Amitabh Shrivastava a physics major, biology minor from the first batch of IISc UG students. Amitabh has developed some really cool engineering tools towards conservation and ecological research. In his final year project, he developed a hexacopter, a fixed wing UAV and an elephant height sensor — all in less than an year. After his UG from IISc, his engineering geekiness landed him in a start-up that makes cool physics toys. He is currently (2017-19) a Masters student at NYU Interactive Telecommunications Program.

Athmanathan Senthilnathan did his UG majoring in Mathematics at IISc.  For his final year project, he worked on developing a merge-split model for mixed species flocking systems, coadvised by Srikanth Iyer from Mathematics Department. After completing his UG degree, in Aug 2015, he moved to the Department of ecology and evolutionary biology at University of Tennessee, USA.

Gokul Nair, Athmanathan Senthilnathan, Srikanth Iyer, and Vishwesha Guttal, 2019, Fission-fusion dynamics and group-size dependent composition in heterogeneous populations, Physical Review E, 99, 032412, doi: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.99.032412  arXiv:1711.06882 [nlin.AO],  Dataand codes,  Download PDF

Nikunj Goel did his UG at IISc majoring in Physics. His final year project focussed on study of early warning signals, developed in the ecology literature, of financial crashes which resulted in a publication and how to predict tipping points using concepts from information theory. After his UG degree, he joined the PhD program at Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University and continues an active collaboration with our lab.

Publication: Vishwesha Guttal*, Srinivas Raghavendran*, Nikunj Goel*, and Quentin Hoarau. 2016, Lack of Critical Slowing Down Suggests that Financial Meltdowns Are Not Critical Transitions, yet Rising Variability Could Signal Systemic Risk,  PLoS ONE, 11(1): e0144198. (*Equal contribution)

Highlights: This publication was covered by Natura Asia with an article titled “Ecological science theory analyses stock market crashes”

Visweswaran Ravikumar majored in Biology with a minor in physics from IISc.  He worked on biofilm experiments (with Prof Dipshikha Chakraborty in MCBL) and modelling vegetation patterns. After getting his UG degree from IISc, he moved to University of Texas for a second Masters program.

Quentin Hoarau, a student from France, from Oct 2014 to Feb 2015, worked on analyzing financial data and built various simple stochastic process based models, which resulted in a publication. 

Publication: Vishwesha Guttal*, Srinivas Raghavendran*, Nikunj Goel*, and Quentin Hoarau. 2016, Lack of Critical Slowing Down Suggests that Financial Meltdowns Are Not Critical Transitions, yet Rising Variability Could Signal Systemic Risk,  PLoS ONE, 11(1): e0144198. (*Equal contribution)

Highlights: This publication was covered by Natura Asia with an article titled “Ecological science theory analyses stock market crashes”

UG (BS/MS Thesis) 2014 or earlier:

Pradeeksha Shetty (MSc from Bangalore University) worked with us for her MSc project for about 6 months from Jan-June 2014 on phylogeny of fish and relating it to their social behaviour.

Sravya Karur, did her B.Tech project from Dec 2012-April 2013 working to develop a model of Salmonella pathogenesis. She then joined TCS as software trainee.

Amit Agrawal, did his BTech project from Dec 2011 to May 2012, and continued as a project assistant for a few years before moving to Israel for his PhD. 

Stephanie Eby*, Amit Agrawal*, Sabiha Majumder, Andew Dobson and Vishwesha Guttal, 2017, Alternative stable states and spatial indicators of critical slowing down along a spatial gradient in a savanna ecosystem,  Global Ecology and Biogeography, 26: 638-649; doi:https://doi.org/10.1111/geb.12570 Download PDF;  Codes and Data are available on Github.  (*These authors contributed equally to this work).