About me

Banner Image: Close up of Buddhist prayer wheels from the Tibetan settlement at Chandragiri, Jeerango, Odisha, India. Odisha used to be an epicenter of Buddhist culture and tradition, although it is not the dominant religion in current Odisha. All images on this website are by Anshuman Swain, unless stated otherwise. Please seek permission before use.

BISI-BEES students during a retreat at Catoctin Mountain Park in the Summer of 2018. Photo courtesy: Da Yin

I have a joint appointment as a Junior Fellow at the Society of Fellows and as a James S. McDonnell Foundation (JSMF) Fellow at Harvard University. I am working under the close mentorship of Javier Ortega-Hernández and Naomi Pierce for my Junior fellowship.

I got my Ph.D. in the Biological Sciences Graduate Program (BISI) at the University of Maryland, College Park in May 2022. I was in the Behavior, Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics (BEES) specialization and worked as a member of Bill Fagan's Lab.

I am interested in complex system approaches to understand and explore ecological systems and evolutionary dynamics - at various spatio-temporal scales.

If you want to just look at my CV, it can be found here. My brief contact details are mentioned here.

I hail from Odisha, a state in the eastern flanks of the Indian peninsula. Surrounded by green, verdant forests and natural features - I was always fascinated by animals, especially snakes - since childhood. The state is very famous for both its cultural and natural heritage - and boasts of one of the six classical languages and one of the eight classical dance forms of India.

I did most of my schooling in a famous coal mine town called Talcher in North Central part of the state. For my high school, I moved to the state's capital Bhubaneswar.

A crocodile rests near a riverbank in Odisha. Three species of crocodilians are found in the state including the famed Gharial.

IISc Undergraduate Class of 2017, in front of the founder's statue.

My initial interest in physics took me to the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bangalore - which is one of leading scientific research institute in India, and I enrolled there as an undergraduate in 2013. My interaction with both students and faculty at IISc changed my views and interests about research and facilitated my entry into the world of biology. Although, I was a physics major - I also took a minor in Biology.

I was confused about my passion and future directions during my undergraduate research stints. Initially I had focused primarily on physics based projects but having taken courses in biology and earth sciences by amazing instructors - inspired me to try something new. I wanted to work on the interface of physics, biology and earth sciences - and it was not an easy step for an undergraduate.

With a lot of support from my mentors and friends, I did my undergraduate thesis on possible origin of prebiotic vesicles - which brought together the three disciplines I wanted to work on. In the meantime, I continued working on side projects in ecology and evolution (including a few amazing field trips to the rainforests in the Western Ghats).

I was intrigued by the interactions and processes in ecology that led to large scale evolutionary events. The vesicle work and its relation to the origin of life was definitely interesting, but led me to understand and channel my true calling.

Inset above: Microscopic images of lipid vesicles that I studied during my undergraduate thesis at IISc, under supervision of Dr Prerna Sharma. Inset below: A view of the rainforests of the Western Ghats during dawn, near Sirsi, Karnataka, India.

I did want to work on evolutionary events, but something more constrained by fossil evidence and geological records. At the same time i wanted to see how micro-scale processes and interactions in ecological/biological systems can cause emergent behaviors, phase transitions or origin of innovations in an evolutionary timescale. To explore these dynamics, I use my training as a physicist - to quantify and analyze the system from a quantitative perspective, while also making sure the models and implications are biologically relevant and above all - interesting.

This led me to join Prof. Bill Fagan's lab (at the University of Maryland, College Park) as a graduate student in the fall of 2017. I used networks and other complex system methods to probe the dynamics of eco-evolutionary processes for my Ph.D. and worked on different aspects of microbial ecology for my dissertation. During my Ph.D., I also worked on a lot of side-projects, especially in paleobiology and plant-insect interactions. For my future research, I plan to use complex systems perspectices in paleobiology.

If you're interested in my published works, a list of my published work can be found here.