Jekyll2026-04-20T10:01:21+00:00https://gauravkbaruah.github.io/feed.xmlEco-Evo Dynamical Resilience LabWe are a newly founded lab based at Center for Ecological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science, India. We develop theory and work on the interface of theoretical ecology and evolutionary dynamics. We also try to validate our theory frameworks with empirical data, microcosm experiments, and field work based in India. We are committed to transparent, honest, reproducible, and open science. Our group aims to provide students with a supportive and open environment that fosters their individual learning and growth. New start at IISc and some general thoughts on the application process2026-03-20T14:24:00+00:002026-03-20T14:24:00+00:00https://gauravkbaruah.github.io/blog/2026/plotlyI accepted a faculty position at IISc just recently and will join in June this year 2026. The process was long and it included a lot of self-doubt along the way. But maybe that post is for another time. More specifically, this is also an entry to the blog post of the group that ranges from academic stuffs, research ideas that might have come, papers that got accepted for example and the thoughts that went in writing that paper, for instance.

The blog is going to be document the steps of building an initial lab and the pitfalls that I might face over time during my transition from EU to India. Almost everyone that I have talked to have indicated that I could be in for a huge culture shock in terms of academia. I am unsure what this means, but let’s see. I will try to document this as I go on; in addition this blog would be about papers, research ideas, some musings from people in the lab.

Application process in India

The whole application process from submitting to getting a position in India was long, and mentally exhausting, and is definitely filled with uncertainty. Beginning of year 2025 is when I finally decided to move back to India, and applied for positions around Jan 2025. Today is 19th March, so a year along the line now.

Overall, I applied to at least 8 different places in India, which included one IISER, three IITs, two TIFRs, one CSIR lab, and IISc. I formally gave a total of four interviews (50 % of my application pool), that included IISc, and had another offer for a faculty position from among these.

It took a lot of preparation along the way. I researched a lot of stuff on the interviews, but of course, none of them were on Indian academia, but mostly on american universities. But all of these resources did help, which I am linking below.

  1. On faculty position in US in ecology and evolution
  2. Overll in US
]]>a post with jupyter notebook2023-07-04T12:57:00+00:002023-07-04T12:57:00+00:00https://gauravkbaruah.github.io/blog/2023/jupyter-notebookTo include a jupyter notebook in a post, you can use the following code:

{::nomarkdown}
{% assign jupyter_path = 'assets/jupyter/blog.ipynb' | relative_url %}
{% capture notebook_exists %}{% file_exists assets/jupyter/blog.ipynb %}{% endcapture %}
{% if notebook_exists == 'true' %}
  {% jupyter_notebook jupyter_path %}
{% else %}
  <p>Sorry, the notebook you are looking for does not exist.</p>
{% endif %}
{:/nomarkdown}

Let’s break it down: this is possible thanks to Jekyll Jupyter Notebook plugin that allows you to embed jupyter notebooks in your posts. It basically calls jupyter nbconvert --to html to convert the notebook to an html page and then includes it in the post. Since Kramdown is the default Markdown renderer for Jekyll, we need to surround the call to the plugin with the ::nomarkdown tag so that it stops processing this part with Kramdown and outputs the content as-is.

The plugin takes as input the path to the notebook, but it assumes the file exists. If you want to check if the file exists before calling the plugin, you can use the file_exists filter. This avoids getting a 404 error from the plugin and ending up displaying the main page inside of it instead. If the file does not exist, you can output a message to the user. The code displayed above outputs the following:

Note that the jupyter notebook supports both light and dark themes.

]]>a post with math2015-10-20T15:12:00+00:002015-10-20T15:12:00+00:00https://gauravkbaruah.github.io/blog/2015/mathThis theme supports rendering beautiful math in inline and display modes using MathJax 3 engine. You just need to surround your math expression with $$, like $$ E = mc^2 $$. If you leave it inside a paragraph, it will produce an inline expression, just like \(E = mc^2\).

To use display mode, again surround your expression with $$ and place it as a separate paragraph. Here is an example:

\[\sum_{k=1}^\infty |\langle x, e_k \rangle|^2 \leq \|x\|^2\]

You can also use \begin{equation}...\end{equation} instead of $$ for display mode math. MathJax will automatically number equations:

\begin{equation} \label{eq:cauchy-schwarz} \left( \sum_{k=1}^n a_k b_k \right)^2 \leq \left( \sum_{k=1}^n a_k^2 \right) \left( \sum_{k=1}^n b_k^2 \right) \end{equation}

and by adding \label{...} inside the equation environment, we can now refer to the equation using \eqref.

Note that MathJax 3 is a major re-write of MathJax that brought a significant improvement to the loading and rendering speed, which is now on par with KaTeX.

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