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News from the lab, September 2026

Hema Somanathan

Hema has been elected for the prestigious position of a Fellow of the Indian National Science Academy, commencing from January, 2027. Many congratulations.

Sudeep R

Sudeep successfully defended his thesis titled ‘Foraging behaviour in the Asian giant honeybee Apis dorsata’. Congratulations.

Sudeep becomes the 7th Doctor from the lab!

Conference Grants:

Navya P

Conference attendance grant from
the Association for the Study of
Animal Behaviour (ASAB) to
attend the ASAB winter conference
2026.

Tejashwi Pindolia

Company of Biologists Travel
Grant for International Workshop
‘Integrative Ecology in the Global
South’.

Sachin Bhaskar

Selected to attend fully funded
New Phytologists Next Generation
Scientist meeting at IISER Pune
(Dec 2026). Awarded a travel grant to attend
the same.

Aakash Kumar Pathak

Vincent Roth Fund for Systematics
Research provided by The
American Arachnological Society.

Travel grant for 23rd International
Congress of Arachnology (ICA
2026).

Congratulations to all.

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Frontier Symposium in Biology 2026, IISER TVM

Hema gave a talk titled, ‘Minimal distortion of web vibrations facilitates collective prey capture in social Spiders’ as part of the Ecology and Evolution panel.

Amal gave a flash talk titled, ‘Understanding the drivers of population differentiation in the Eastern honey bee (Apis cerana) in India’.

Shahnaz presented a poster titled, ‘Understanding nectar robbery dynamics in a perennial shrub Asystasia gangetica‘.

Hema and Shatarupa were part of a panel discussion on “Leaky pipeline- Understanding Gender Gaps in Academia”, commemorating International Day of Women and Girls in Science.

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Sachin presented a poster at the British Ecological Society Annual meeting 2025, held at Edinburgh, Scotland.

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2025

December

Hema gave an invited lecture titled’Lights, Colour, Action: Vision in diurnal and nocturnal insects’ at the EMBO India Lecture course on Neuroethology – how the brain controls natural behaviours held at IISER Pune.

October

Hema gave a plenary talk titled ‘Moonlight mutualisms’ at the Indian Society of Evolutionary Biologists (ISEB7), held at IISER Berhampur.

Bhavya Dharmaraj was awarded the ANRF – National Post Doctoral Fellowship. Congrats Bhavya!

August

Several members of the lab attended the XXXVIII International Ethological Congress, Behaviour 2025 in Kolkata, India. Hema, Manish, Kaustubh, and Avani gave talks. Sudeep, Sachin, Navya and Smriti presented posters.

BES Travel Awards for Behavior 2025 were awarded to Sachin & Smriti

Dakshin Foundation & CES, IISc Grant for Behaviour 2025 for Avani

Navya won the award for the Best Poster in the Undergraduate Category.

June

Hema gave a plenary talk at the  Indian conference on Conservation (ICCON 25) at WII, Dehradun, titled ‘Sensory and cognitive ecology of bees’

July

Avani, Navya, and Smriti completed their M.S. projects in the lab and received their B.S – M.S. degrees. Congrats to the new graduates!

Hema gave an invited talk titled ‘ Bees and our shared future’ at the 110 years of Zoological Survey of India conference, Kolkata.

Bhavya joined the lab as a Postdoctoral Fellow.

May

Aakash was awarded the Vincent Roth Fund for Systematics Research (VRF) by the American Arachnological Society. Congrats Aakash!

March

Asmi completed her tenure as a Postdoctoral Researcher in the lab and joined as a Dairy Instructor with the Kerala Dairy Farmers Welfare Board. Congratulations Asmi!

Hema gave an invited talk titled ‘Left in the dark: ‘Nocturnal pollinators and the plants they service in a brightly-lit world’ at the Journal of Experimental Biology – Company of Biologists symposium in Liverpool, UK.

January

Shatarupa joined the lab as a Postdoctoral Fellow.

Rohan joined the lab as a Ph.D. student in the Vasanth semester of 2025.
He has a BS-MS degree from IISER Bhopal.

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Research grants for Sachin

Sachin has been awarded the Small Research Grant (spring 2024) from the British Ecological Society, London, for his work on co-flowering communities in the shola grasslands.

Additionally, he was also awarded a seed grant from the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation (2024), for his work on flower-cheater dynamics in the southern Western Ghats, India.