Engagement

I have taught at the University of Lausanne since 2021, on Bachelor's and Master's courses in conservation biology, population biology, experimental design, spatial analysis and scientific writing. At NCBS, I co-taught the PhD course Current Topics in Mechanisms of Animal Behaviour in 2021, after assisting on the PhD course Introduction to Animal Behaviour in 2016. I have also examined Master's theses and projects at Lausanne since 2021.

Since 2023, I have guided three projects in other Lausanne groups from design to manuscript as senior author: on social development in vervet monkeys, on accelerometer-based behavioural classification, and on deep-learning classification of Drosophila behaviour.

Before that, I co-supervised three Master's theses: on behavioural maturation in Apis cerana and on the dance behaviour of Apis florea at NCBS, and on the task trajectories of ant workers at Lausanne. I also co-supervised three project assistants at NCBS. Four of those six went on to doctoral studies.

I am a founding board member of Animal Behaviour Live, which I run with a team of early-career researchers from across the globe. Its free online conference draws 600 to more than 1,000 registrations from over 50 countries each year; about two thirds of participants are early-career researchers and two thirds identify as female.

I led the 2022 and 2024 editions and co-led those in 2021 and 2023, and co-organised its seminar series, in which PIs and early-career researchers presented their work together.

I was also on the organising committee of the European IUSSI Congress 2024 in Lausanne, and of the Animal Behaviour Twitter Conference in 2023. In 2024, I led a team of postdocs hosting a local watch party of the Evolution 2024 congress for three Lausanne departments, so that researchers could take part without the carbon cost of travel.

I have convened four symposia at international congresses, on collective behaviour, division of labour and AI in animal behaviour: at the IUSSI International Congresses in San Diego (2022) and Freiburg (2026), the European IUSSI Congress in Lausanne (2024) and Behaviour 2025 in Kolkata.

I regularly present at the IUSSI congresses, Behaviour and the ISBE congress, and gave invited seminars at the Universities of Münster, Würzburg and Toulouse in 2025.

I review for journals including Science, PNAS, Proceedings of the Royal Society B and the Journal of Experimental Biology. You can find the details on ORCID and Web of Science.

I archive the data, and the code where feasible, for my first- and senior-author papers. I organised a workshop on reproducible workflows with R and GitHub at Lausanne, and co-organised a workshop series on free animal-tracking tools.

At Lausanne, I have organised workshops on inclusive conferences and on gender bias in academia, and co-organised the "Let's Talk" round tables on academic careers. At Animal Behaviour Live, I co-organised round tables on inclusivity and the "Meet the PI" sessions, where early-career researchers talk with plenary speakers about navigating academia. I also served on the committee of Lausanne's Association for Postdocs in the Natural Sciences.

I have also written two papers on how online conferences can be made more inclusive; they are described under Inclusivity in scientific platforms.

From 2020 to 2023, I co-founded and wrote for ScienceOut, an online platform that published stories about science and scientists in India, in English and regional languages. It aimed to give inclusive coverage of the diverse voices in Indian academia. My articles covered babbler vocal communication, avian malaria in the Western Ghats and dog population control, and I helped run ScienceView, its interview series with early-career researchers.

My papers have been covered by The Hindu, Deccan Herald, phys.org and ScienceDaily, among others. The most widely covered were the studies on honey bee dance dialects and on how Asian honey bees estimate distance; the links list the news stories for each. The paper on wound care in ants was featured in This Week in PNAS. I have been quoted as an expert source in The New York Times, and interviewed about my work on Asian honey bees by Science to Share at Utrecht University.

At NCBS, I took part in Science Day for school students and Moth Day for the general public.