Vishwesha Guttal, is broadly interested in Theoretical Ecology and Evolution, including Coehavior focusing on the evolutionary aspects, and spatiotemporal patterns, self-organization and abrupt changes in ecosystems.
PhD Students
Jaideep Joshi is in the PhD program of Centre for Ecological Sciences. He graduated from IIT Bombay with a B.Tech in Electrical Engineering but his real interest lies in ecology, and “field work”. He will likely work on collective animal movement and he is always thinking how to find an opportunity to work in the field!
Sabiha Sachdeva is in the Integrated PhD program of Department of Physics, IISc. She is working jointly with Prof. Sriram Ramaswamy (Department of Physics, IISc and currently the Director of TIFR Hyderabad) and Vishwesha Guttal to investigate phase transitions in ecosystem vegetation patterns.
Project Assistants
Amit Agrawal (BTech, Biotech from Madhya Pradesh) has been working with us from Jan 2012, initially as a project assistant and now as a visitor, and has analyzed spatial vegetation patterns of Serengeti ecosystem (in collaboration with Stephany Eby). His long term interset is to stop aging!
- Ashwin Viswanathan
I did my B.Tech in Mechanical Engineering from BITS, Pilani in 2009 and I finished my MSc. Wildlife Biology and Conservation from NCBS (2012). I am interested in plant-animal interactions, mutualisms and evolutionary ecology. My MSc dissertation was on seed dispersal in Namdapha Tiger reserve in Arunachal Pradesh. I joined the lab in October 2012 and am working on spatial patterns of vegetation in semi-arid India (Rajasthan, Gujarat, etc). My project involves understanding how environmental variables (like rainfall and temperature) characterize spatial patterns of vegetation in water limited systems and how these patterns respond to stress. These patterns or a breakdown in expected patterns often signal a potentially catastrophic change in the state of the ecosystem. I joined the lab to become familiar with the application of quantitative theory in ecology. I tentatively plan to examine seed dispersal, frugivore resource tracking and other plant-animal interactions, both mathematically and empirically, in the future. I would also like to eventually continue research in NE India.
Visitors
Chhavi Chawla: I completed my B.tech in Biotechnology in the year 2012. I spend my last semester working as an intern in Prof. Vidyanand Nanjundiah’s lab, there on, I became really interested in studying and analyzing the evolution of social behavior. Currently I have joined Prof. Vishwesha guttal, to understand the phylogenetic basis for the evolution of social behavior among vertebrates, particularly fishes. I plan to spend an year with him. With such a congenial atmosphere around in the lab, I look forward to do some exciting research in near future.
Nitin Saxena (BTech, Biotechnology from Rajasthan) is visiting us from Jan 2013. He is working data mining of fish database and also helping us with course work on Theoretical and Mathematical Ecology in Jan 2013 semester.
Arpitha Prasad, BE in Telecommunication Engineering from BMS College of Engineering, Bangalore, will spend an year working on collective animal behavior. She plans to pursue higher studies in Applied Mathematics.
Ajith Ashokan, (MSc from Kerala), is working with on vegetation patterns of semi-arid ecosystems from Jan 2013.
Those who moved on:
Sravya Karur, did her B.Tech project from Dec 2012-April 2013 working to develop a model of Salmonella pathogenesis.
Ashwini G, pursuing her masters in Physics, Govt Science College, Bangalore, visited us from Oct 2012 to Dec 2012 to work on semi-arid vegetation patterns in India.
Sweta Panwar, visited us from June 2012-Dec 2012 to work on her M. Tech project from Univ. of Rajasthan, Jaipur, Her interest was in computational models of evolution of collective animal behavior.
Amit Agrawal worked with us from April 2012-Sept 2012 as a project assistant and analyzed spatial vegetation patterns of Serengeti ecosystem (in collaboration with Stephany Eby).
Payal Bal worked with us from Jan 2012-Sept 2012 as a project assistant and analyzed spatial vegetation patterns of semi-arid ecosystems in the US (in collaboration with Brandon Bestelmeyer)
Debtanu Chakraborty, an Integrated MS student from IISER Kolkata, studied classic models of evolutionary theory and Eureqa software.
Athmanathan, a 1st year undergraduate student at IISc, worked on building models of population growth and competition in limited resource environments.
Vamsi, a 1st year undergraduate student at IISc, and did reading on financial market crashes (in collaboration with Prof. Srinivas Raghavendra).
Madhura Ambekar, an Integrated MSc student in Systems Biology from Univ. Hyderabad, studied methods of analyzing animal movement patterns based on Brownian Bridge Models and applied it to couple of real data sets. Duration: May-July 2012 (2 months).
Ashwini S Dev, a final year student of Biotechnology, from PES College of Engineering from Bangalore used Google earth to dig a bunch of spatial patterns of vegetation in Indian semi-arid ecosystems.
Vignesh: Lab rotation student, from Jan 2012 – Feb 2012. He played around with random walks and animal movement behaviors, and fell in love with Matlab!
Sneha Vishwanath: A lab rotation student during March-April 2012. She looked at phylogenetic patterns in fish species, and I learnt some basics of phylogenetic analysis from her!
Adithya Kalley, an integrated MSc Physics student from NIT Surat, visited our lab for a few weeks during his winter break, in the months of Nov and Dec of 2011. He worked on simulations of collective motion in animal groups.
As a postdoc at CouzinLab@Princeton, I advised some undergraduate research projects – listed below:
Eddie Lee, Phase transitions in simple swarming models (from Dept of Physics, Princeton Univ, Spring 2011).
Minqi Jiang, A matlab implementation of Voronoi to determine `domain of danger’ in a swarming system (from Dept of Computer Science, Princeton Univ, Summer 2010).
Simon Leblanc, Investigation of phase transitions in real fish using optical flow techniques, (from France, Summer 2009)
Michael P Casey, The evolution of group size distribution in foraging animals (from Dept of Math, Princeton Univ, Summer 2009).
Angadhjot Hundal, Developing a user-friendly graphical interface of swarming dynamics for predation experiments (from IIT-KGP, Summer 2009).
