About

I’m a Ramanujan Faculty Fellow at the Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research, Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, India.

Fascinated by the biodiversity and its maintenance, I explore asymmetry in arthropod evolution using interdisciplinary approaches including genomic interrogations, machine learning, laboratory-based functional experiments, simulation modeling, natural history collections, species discovery, data mobilization through citizen science and ecological metadata. My goal is to understand patterns and exceptions in their evolution that can explain the evolutionary history of their extant diversity.

My present affiliations-Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), University of Wisconsin-Madison, George Washington University, California Academy of Sciences, and the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution play most active roles in nurturing my scientific interests.

Once a month, I engage with citizen scientists across south Asia and help documenting spiders (e.g. SpiderIndia groups on iNaturalist, Facebook and India Biodiversity Portal), a long-term initiative to document spiders. We also organize events like Spider Week and annual meetings in the Indian subcontinent.

Other than research, my life includes travelling and, playing badminton and cricket.