Current Lab – Behavioural Ecology Lab

Current Lab

We are a group of enthusiastic people who are fascinated by the diversity of life, in form and function. This fascination in combination with our passion for basic science has brought us together here. People in the lab have diverse interests under the overarching theme of behavioural ecology.

Principal Investigator

Manjari with the youngest member of lab, Anushka!

Appointments and Academic History

Oct 2020: Associate Professor, Dept. of Biological Sciences, IISER Mohali.
2013 - 2020: Assistant Professor, Dept. of Biological Sciences, IISER Mohali.
2013: NSF postdoctoral fellowship* at Syracuse University, USA (*declined).
2013: Research Associate, School of Natural Sciences and Engineering, NIAS, Bangalore.
2011 - 2012: Post-doctoral intern, IEBES, University of Zurich.
2011: Visiting Postdoc, School of Biological Sciences, University of Bristol.
2010 - 2011: Research Associate, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.
2004 - 2011: Ph.D. student, CES, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.

Post-doctoral Fellow

Sujata Saini (2019 - )

Brief Bio

Sujata is a trained taxonomist and she studied the taxonomy of moths belonging to superfamily Bombycoidea (Order: Lepidoptera) from North-Western India for her Ph.D. Her research at BEL focuses on moth diversity, distribution and taxonomy. At BEL she co-supervised the a Masters thesis student (Deepak Negi) and is currently co-supervising another Masters thesis student (Ankush Sharma).
2013 - 2018: Ph.D. Dept. of Zoology, Punjabi University, Patiala.

2011-2012: B.Ed. Government College of Education, Jalandhar.
2009-2011: M.Sc. Zoology, Khalsa College, Amritsar.
2006-2009: B.Sc. Adarsh Bhartiya College, Pathankot

Ph. D. Students

Soniya Yambem (2015 - )

UGC- Senior Research Fellow (2015-2020)

Sonam Chorol (2016 - )

UGC- Senior Research Fellow (2016 - )

Anindya Chaudhuri (2017- )

CSIR- Senior Research Fellow (2017 - )

Gaurav Singh (2020 - )

Kanika Rajput (2020 - )

UGC- Junior Research Fellow (2020 - )

Soniya, Sonam, Gaurav and Kanika are working on various aspects of acoustic communication in social babblers and their social behaviour.

Anindya is working on the behaviour of field crickets, with a special focus on male-male agonistic interactions.

All of them need to conduct extensive fieldwork to collect data and do extensive lab-based signal and statistical analyses to interpret the data.

BEL is truly diverse, with the 9 members of the lab representing 8 different states of India!

Master's Students

Ankush (2020-)

Angeline Lakra (2020-)