Baheerathan successfully defends his thesis on the 16th of Dec 2022, titled ‘Visual ecology of pteropodid bats of southern India’. The defense lasted for more than an hour and it was very engaging. He has made his way to the scientific world of bats! Congratulations Bahee, we will remember your passion for bats and may you mentor more bat enthusiasts.
Prime Minister’s Research Fellowship for Manish!
Manish has been awarded the prestigious PMRF for his Ph.D. We are extremely proud of this. All the very best for your endeavours.
Balu joins Newcastle as a research associate.
Balu joined the lab in 2011 as a Ph.D, completes three postdocs since, and leaves for Newcastle as a research associate. We wish him all the very best.
Travel awards for Sajesh!
Sajesh has been awarded the ESEB (European Society for Evolutionary Biology) Travel Award to attend ESEB 2022 in Prague and a Developing Neuroethology Award from the International Society for Neuroethology to attend ICN 2022 in Lisbon. Apart from these, he is also attending ICE 2022 in Helsinki.
We wish him happy traveling!
Kavya gets a research grant from ABS
Kavya Mohan has received the student research grant from the Animal Behaviour Society for her research on the foraging ranges of tropical bees.
Lab participation at FS-BIO 2022.
Aditya, Anumit, Asmi, Reshma and Sudeep presented a part of their works during the poster presentation at the FS-BIO symposium, 2022. Sajesh gives a students talk on the “Shimmering behaviour of Apis dorsata” and bags the “Flash talk award” for the same.
Well presented you guys!
Below are the pics of Aditya, Asmi, Reshma and Sudeep flaunting their posters.
Last one is Sajesh giving his talk.
Picture courtesy: Anumit Saralkar (1-4), Yash Bhale (5).
New PhD students joined the lab!
Sachin Bhaskar, Amal K Vyas, and Manish R have joined the lab in the Monsoon intake of 2021. Welcome you guys!
New faces in the lab :)
Aditya Ghosal and Reshma Basak joined the lab as post-docs in August 2020 Aditya is interested in social spiders and Reshma will explore olfactory behaviour of stingless bees.
Hema receives the Mercator Fellowship
Prof. Hema Somanathan @somanathan_hema has been awarded the Mercator fellowship from DFG @dfg_public, Germany. As a Mercartor fellow she will be a visiting professor at Biocentrum, University of Würzburg, Germany for three years. @tvmiiser @bio_iisertvm https://t.co/Q4EDzj8ZJ0 pic.twitter.com/iYN7jeP01i
— School of Biology, IISER-Thiruvananthapuram (@bio_iisertvm) June 24, 2021
Visiting visual ecology experts!
We had three eminent visual ecology experts from the Lund University, Sweden (Prof. Dan-Eric Nilsson) and SOKENDAI – The Graduate University for Advanced Studies, Japan (Prof. Michiyo Kinoshita and Prof. Kentaro Arikawa) visiting our lab from February 21st to 27th. The School of Biology hosted a seminar series where they delivered talks covering various topics focussing on animal vision. Michiyo discussed “Innate colour preference of Papilio butterflies” where she focussed on the interaction between vision and olfaction in butterflies. Dan explained the “Evolution of the eyes” where he detailed how and when low-resolution vision evolved in invertebrates and how that formed the basis for the high-resolution animal eyes. Kentaro discussed the “Physiology of butterfly colour vision” where he explained how the anatomy and neurophysiology of the butterfly compound eyes could be correlated with their ability to discriminate different colours.
