News

2024

In February 2024, I participated in Andina in the gorgeous Parque Nacional Conguillio in southern Chile on an early career researcher fellowship. It was an amazing experience - the unusual workshop format coupled with the theme (Ecology for Social Revolution) resulted in productive discussions, exciting collaborations, and hopefully meaningful outputs in the near future. I also got to explore some incredible locations along the Andes mountain range - from cosmopolitan Santiago to Temuco and Conguillio NP in the south to the Atacama desert and the Chilean Altiplano in the north. I was also lucky enough to try some delicious local foods.

2023

It was amazing to be a part of the National Geographic Leadership Workshop in Hong Kong in May 2023.

2022

I was invited to attend the Women's Convening in Asia event organized by National Geographic in October 2022. It was an incredible experience being a part of the Convening in South Korea, meeting some amazing women doing fantastic work in different parts of the world, sampling superb Korean food, and exploring Seoul and surrounding areas.
National Geographic featured me across their social media in July 2022. (Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn)

I attended the International Statistical Ecology Conference (ISEC 2022) in gorgeous Cape Town, South Africa over the summer of 2022 thanks to a travel award from URI. It was exciting to return to South Africa after many years and revisit places I'd been to as a child and check out some new wonders.

I was able to attend SciPy 2022 in Austin, TX in July thanks to a travel scholarship from the organizers. The first in-person meeting since SciPy 2019 due to the pandemic was bigger than ever!

This article in Hindi on "How safe and inclusive is science for women and non-binary scientists in India?" published in Feminism India by Malabika Dhar has quotes from Sayantan Datta, Vinita Gowda, and me.

2021

I've joined the University of Rhode Island as a postdoctoral research fellow leading the collaborative Global Animal Diel Activity Project with Brian Gerber (an assistant professor at the University of Rhode Island), Mason Fidino (a quantitative ecologist at the Lincoln Park Zoo), and Zach Farris (an assistant professor at Appalachian State University).

2020

I have been awarded a National Geographic Early Career Grant for my dissertation field research in Zambia, joining the cohort of 2020 NatGeo Explorers. (Announcements: UMass ECo Website)

I have been selected as the Organismic & Evolutionary Biology (OEB) program's inaugural Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI) Fellow for 2020-21.
I have been selected to represent UMass at the Catalyzing Advocacy in Science and Engineering (CASE) workshop in Washington D.C. (Mar 29 to Apr 1).

The first chapter of my PhD dissertation has been published in Ecography. This paper was a finalist for the E4 Award, published in the special E4 Award edition of Ecography in November 2020, and featured in the Ecography podcast hosted by George Chan and Jodie Harris of Blue Fire Films.

2019

I crossed a 1000 days of birding everyday for at least 15 minutes and uploading a checklist to ebird on Sep 27th, 2019.
I've been awarded the UMass Natural History Collections Grant and OEB Research Grant to conduct a pilot field study on carnivore community dynamics in Kasanka National Park, Zambia (Blog posts in That's Life[Science]: Tales from Trails - Field Dispatches from Africa and More Tales from Trails).
My conservation-themed essay on an invasive plant that is modifying the desert and grassland landscapes of Kutch, originally titled Meditations on Mesquite, was published in The Wire. (There Is Nary a Pest as Hated as Mesquite in the Desert Flatland of Kutch)
The ViXeN paper was a finalist for this year's Robert May Prize instituted by Methods in Ecology and Evolution. (Blog post in the MEE blog)
The Biology of Booze ft. Tequila has been published in That's Life[Science].

2018

My curated shortfilm made entirely of camera trap videos from my MSc thesis research on carnivores in Kutch has been published as a minipost titled Critter Candid Cam in That's Life[Science].
My article on species interactions titled You Scratch My Back and I'll Scratch Yours has been published in That's Life[Science].
The Field Secrets blog has featured this post on my time in the field after cancer.
I've been awarded a Diversity Scholarship to attend the Scientific Computing with Python (SciPy) conference at Austin, TX in July 2018.
My research was showcased as part of the Pipettes & Paintbrushes exhibit, a collaboration between scientists and artists, organized by That's Life Science. My artist collaborator, Michelle Chen, wrote a lovely poem called Whiteout and made a painting titled Data Flurry.

2017

The paper on ViXeN (software for managing multimedia data) has been published in Methods in Ecology and Evolution. (Blog post in the MEE blog)
Field stories and folktales from Kutch titled A Salt County Almanac was published in the September 2017 edition of Saevus magazine.
My essay, Stories in the Sand (Pg 6 of the souvenir booklet), featuring field stories from Kutch, was one of the winners of UNESCO C2C's Nature Writers Competition 2017. The prize included an opportunity to be a part, all expenses paid, of the two-venue event "Celebrating Natural Heritage: In Literature, Arts, and Culture" held at the Wildlife Institute of India in Dehradun and the spectacularly beautiful Great Himalayan National Park.

Pre-2016

This article on birding near the Powai Lake in Mumbai was selected as one of the two best entries for the M. Krishnan Memorial Nature Writing Award 2016. (In the media)
A version of this essay on the wildlife of the Andaman Islands, titled The Restaurant at the Edge of the Reef, made it to the shortlist of the M. Krishnan Memorial Nature Writing Award 2014 but did not win.
I got Expedia's Travel Writing Award in 2012 for this post about camping in the Death Valley and the prize included an all-expenses paid trip to the UK. Their official blog contains travel updates from me and the other winning travel bloggers.