Hello and welcome!
We study how animals navigate an extraordinarily complex world. Between dodging predators and finding a decent meal, animals are constantly making choices that affect whether they survive long enough to reproduce. At the heart of our lab is a big question: Can organisms shape their own evolutionary trajectories through behaviour? To explore this, we focus on how animals manage predation risk, nutrition, competition, and even human disturbance—and how those everyday behavioural choices end up altering their mating patterns and ultimately evolutionary trajectories.
To figure this out, we run innovative experiments using arthropod and anuran model systems. Our work spans everything from controlled lab experiments and semi-natural enclosures (mesocosms) to field studies with wild populations in their native habitats. This mixed approach lets us spot big ecological patterns while figuring out the mechanisms that actually drive them. All of our hands-on research is grounded in formal mathematical theory, and we work towards building new conceptual frameworks to understand how species interact. If you’d like to know more, check out our research and the publications pages.
We are based at GITAM, a private research University in Visakhapatnam. Surrounded by hills, forests, and a beach, it’s not just a gorgeous place to work but also provides a supportive backdrop for our research to flourish.
Recent news
- April 2026: Viraj is awarded the ANRF Prime Minister Early Career Grant to study how competition and predation shapes the nutrition-fitness relationship! 🥳
- March 2026: Shivam secures a student research grant from the widely-respected Animal Behavior Society! 🎉
- March 2026: Viraj publishes a commentary titled ‘Rethinking same-sex sexual behavior: from sensory error to social function‘ in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)
- Feburary 2026: Dhwani attends the ‘Advanced Acoustics Workshop’ offered by the Bird Lab in collaboration with the K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics, Cornell University, held at IISER Tirupati. She also presented her research plans there.
- December 2025: Shivam attends the ‘Foundations of Field Ecology‘ workshop offered by Indica School of Field Ecology and Conservation, held at NCBS Field Station, Pachmarhi
- October 2025: Viraj presents his past work at the 6th Conference of the Indian Society of Evolutionary Biologists.
- August 2025: Viraj gives an invited talk at the Behaviour 2025 conference. During this conference, he also organised a couple of symposia.
- July 2025: Dhwani Dave and Shivam Shinde join as the first PhD students in the lab!
- October 2024: Paper published in eLife! Here’s a short summary about our work. And here’s Viraj’s twitter thread doing the same.
- July 2024: Joined the Department of Life Sciences of GITAM (Visakhapatnam campus) as an Assistant Professor.