People

Gaurav Baruah

Gaurav Baruah. Assistant Professor, Centre for Ecological Sciences, IISc, Bangalore, India. I did my BS-MS from IISER Kolkata, and then went on to do my PhD at University of Zurich, and I did a short post-doc at EAWAG, Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Sciences, Switzerland in 2022, and then did my second independent postdoc as a DFG (German Science Foundation) Walter Benjamin Fellow at the Theoretical Biology group at Bielefeld University, Germany before joining IISc in 2026.

Swastik Patnaik

I’m a new PhD student joining EEDR lab planning to work on plant-pollinator interactions, looking to employ field,modelling and data analytic approaches to figure out properties which define and regulate these interactions and how they change. This will help us then make predictions as to how particular species’ will respond to different conditions which can have implications which will help inform conservation and restoration praxis as well. My journey into ecology has been a serendipitous one. Having done my undergraduate studies in mathematics, I spent a bit of time doing diverse projects on predator-prey networks, grassland-savanna-forest ecosystems, colouration in lizards and plant community ecology and gaining experience with modelling, data analysis and fieldwork.

Outside of work I like learning about nature, being particularly partial towards plants, herps and birds. I also like spending time in the gym, jamming on the bass, playing football and cooking.

Yogesh Kumar KC

I am a research assistant joining the EEDR lab. I will tentatively be working on models of sublinear growth and evolutionary rescue. I graduated from IISER-TVM with a major in Mathematics. My journey into theoretical ecology and evolution is an accidental one. I started out working on a metapopulation patch model of prey-predator disease dynamics for my physics minor, following a suggestion from a friend. Then, for my major, I worked on models of collective behavior with variable speed and genomic-scale metabolic networks. Now, I am interested in microbial ecology and evolution, which I want to pursue my doctorate in. Outside of work, I play football, board games, and read books, and dabble in amateur writing.

Niharika Chipli

I joined the EEDR lab as a Research Assistant in August 2026, straight after finishing my Master’s thesis at the Centre for Ecological Sciences, IISc, under Prof. Vishwesha Guttal. My background is in physics — I did my BSc at Azim Premji University and my MSc at St Joseph’s University, Bengaluru — and my thesis work was on rate-induced tipping points, using stochastic differential equations to understand how the speed of an external driver, not just its strength, can push a system past a point of no return. In the lab, I’m now building on Sarah Antl’s work on stage-structured Lotka-Volterra competition, extending the two-species framework to communities of more than two competing species, to explore how cross-stage self-limitation and trait variation shape coexistence as community complexity grows. Outside of work, I swim, play badminton and Crochet.

Aryan Awasthi

I’m a Bachelor’s student at IISc, broadly interested in how communities come to behave as a single unit, and how variation among individuals and their habitats affects the overall dynamics. I currently work on how disturbances travel through habitat networks: when a population is knocked down in one place, how far the effect spreads, and whether it lingers. I am developing the theory for it alongside simulations, and testing the predictions on experimental results. Outside of work I do science communication. I’m interested in using art to convey scientific ideas, and I swim.

Philipp Sewing

Philipp Sewing is a Bachelor student from Bielefeld. He is working on how dispersal and warming impacted tipping points in spatial plant-pollinator networks.

Sarah Antl

Sarah is doing her bachelor thesis and is from Koblenz, Germany. Her background is on mathematics and biology. She is working on stage-structured eco-evolutionary dynamics and species coexistence. Currently she is doing her Bachelor in Biomathematics at the University of Applied Sciences Koblenz. Additionally she is a dancer and likes to spend her free time reading, listening to music or travelling. She equally enjoys making new contacts, visiting friends (also internationally) and relaxing alone in nature.

Leopold Mürtz

Leopold Mürtz is currently completing his BSc thesis within the Eco-Evo Dynamical Resilience Lab. Prior to this, he successfully finished a project module in the Theoretical Biology AG, where he focused on incorporating temperature fluctuations into an eco-evolutionary model. He has been studying Bioinformatics and Genome Research since 2021 in Bielefeld. Alongside his studies, he has been working as a student assistant at NTT Data Business Solutions AG since 2023. His academic interests center on mathematical modelling and data analysis, particularly in the context of complex biological systems.