News

May 2023: Saskya joins the Journal of Animal Ecology as an Associate editor.

April 2023: Congratulations to Nithin Shakti for defended his bachelors thesis titled Modelling perspectives for partial resource use by parasitoid wasps

Feb. 2023: Saskya was part of the a four day zoom workshop, Inclusive Ecology, run by the Centre for Ecological Sciences. The workshop introduced students from under-represented groups to broad concepts and approaches in the fields of Ecology, Evolution, Behaviour, Conservation, and Quantitative Thinking, and to the practicalities of graduate school.

Feb. 2023: Saskya received a three years SERB CORE research grant for the project Community structure and dynamics of parasitoid wasps and their butterfly hosts in a complex ecological system

Feb. 2023: A new paper in collaboration with Ann Hajek and David Harris in Neobiota, on mixed invasive and native host-parasitoid and nematode interactions

Feb. 2023: See our new Forum article in Economic Entomology: Dynamic economic thresholds for agricultural pests and the importance of migration between field and off-field locations by Keasar, T., Wajnberg, E. Heimpel, G., Hardy, Ian C.W., Shaltiel, L., Gottlieb, D., van Nouhuys, S.

January 2023: We are excited to welcome two new NPDF postdocs to the lab. Prabitha Mohan is investigating the role of competition in diet specialization by parasitoids. Suvarna Khadakkar is studying the effects of habitat degradation on dung beetles in sacred groves.
We are also excited to welcome two new PhD students, Shreya Gangwal and Anaswar P. See the People page for all of their bios.

December 2022: Our small grant proposal Climate change and Bengaluru: Applying a biodiversity lens for a sustainable city from the Bengaluru Sustainability Forum with Ravi Jambhekar and Jagdish Krishnaswamy from IHSS was funded! Get ready to see how climate change is changing the behavior of Urban birds and butterflies.

August 2022: New PhD student Sonali has joined the lab! See people page

July 2022: Aditya Nayak joined us as a summer undegraduate intern from IISER Mohali. He did a literature review of change in genome size associated with plant domestication. He also worked on finding local parasitoids of Lepidoptera on Citrus.

June 30th 2022: The Working group on theoretical approaches to biological control and conservation is over. Here is a news article about what we were doing.

May 3rd 2022: A photo of Saskya and Pranoy featured on the running head of the IISc webpage, linking to Saskya as a “woman scientist of IISc” answering some queries about career path and science.

February 2022: The five month working group on theoretical approaches to biological control and conservation at the Israeli Institute of Advanced studies has started. Saskya is spending three weeks there in February, and then going back again in the summer. In between she is participating via Zoom.

Working group fellows

February 2022: Our new paper, with Ann Hajek and others, on the association of a nematode and its woodwasp host is out. Look here to see our consideration of how this complex association persists in a natural ecological system.

January 2022: New PhD student Pranoy MS has joined the lab. See people page. Stay tuned for news on what he decides to work on!

October 2021: Saskya has taken a faculty position at the Indian Institute of Science, Centre for Ecological Sciences, in Bangalore, India!

If you want to read Old News, head over here