Evolutionary Biology Laboratory
Department of Biological Sciences
Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Mohali
Evolutionary Biology Laboratory



Welcome to the Evolutionary Biology Laboratory at IISER Mohali!
We work in the broad area of evolutionary genetics. Our special interest lies in understanding the co-evolution between males and females of a species. In promiscuous species, the correlation for fitness between males and females is less than one. Thus, males and females can potentially evolve traits that increase their own Darwinian fitness but harm the fitness of the other sex. This leads to open-ended cycles of adaptation and counter adaptation - a form of intra-species Red Queen process - often called Intersexual Conflict. Such antagonistic co-evolution between sexes has been suggested to drive rapid divergence between populations in their life-history and behaviour and act as an engine for speciation. The long term goal of our lab is to understand the interplay between sexual conflict, sexual selection and life-history evolution. Specifically, we are working on
Sexual conflict and Sexual Selection
Evolutionary Ecology of immunity
Lab News:
October 2022
Congratulations Aparajita for successfully defending your Ph.D. thesis!
September 2022
Congratulations Tejinder Singh for successfully defending your Ph.D. thesis!
Congratulations Manas Arun Samant for successfully defending your Ph.D. thesis!
August 2022
Shivam joins the lab as a PhD student!
June 2021
Congratulations Komal for successfully defending your Ph.D. thesis!
December 2020
Congratulations Prasad for being elected as a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences, Bengaluru.
December 2018
Dr. Prasad is elected a fellow of the Indian National Science Academy
September 2018
Aparajita presents her research at EMPSEB24 in Bubión, Granada (Spain)
August 2018
Manas presents a poster at the Second Joint Congress on Evolutionary Biology in Montpellier.
June 2018
Zeeshan joins Prof. Scott Pitnick at Syracuse University as a Post Doctoral Fellow.
May 2018
Karan, Prakhar, Harshavardhan, Aatashi, Vaibhvi, Reshma, and Parvathy get awarded their BS-MS degrees on the 7th convocation IISER Mohali.
March 2018
TJ and Rohit attend The Third Bangalore School on Population Genetics and Evolution (PGE2018) at ICTS Bangalore
January 2018
It is very cold.
Zeeshan successfully defends his Ph.D. thesis titled "Sex, and Its tentacles: The impact of sexual conflict on reproductive and life history trait evolution and reproductive isolation among populations." Mubarkaan!!!
December 2017
Uddyalok attends the National Drosophila Research Conference at IISER Bhopal.
Zeeshan, Rohit, Ruchika, Komal, Neetika and Aparajita attend the Conference on Evolutionary and Integrative Biology at IISER Pune.
Vinesh joins Dr. Guy Bloch's group at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem as a Post-doctoral Fellow.
October 2017
Rohit, Komal, Vaibhvi, Reshma, Harshvardhan, and undergraduates attend the International Conference in Zoological Sciences and Ants at Punjabi University in Patiala.
Rohit and Komal win Best Talk Awards
Zeeshan joins Dr. Bodhisatta Nandy at IISER Berhampur as a Post Doctoral Fellow.
August 2017
Aabeer Kumar Basu joins the lab as a Ph.D. Student
July 2017
Zeeshan's paper gets covered by The Hindu- http://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/science/inter-sex-arms-race-leads-to-new-species-formation/article19193775.ece
June 2017
Zeeshan's paper 'Reproductive Isolation through Experimental Manipulation of Sexually Antagonistic Coevolution in Drosophila melanogaster' gets published in Nature Scientific Reports.
May 2017
Atisha, Sushma, Akansha, Martik, Megha and Ekta get awarded their BS-MS degrees on the 6th convocation IISER Mohali.
April 2017
Dr. Bodhisatta Nandy, former PhD student receives INSA medal for young scientist award 2017.
Dr. Imroze Khan joins Ashoka University as Assistant Professor.
February 2017
Dr. Vanika Gupta joins Prof. Brian Lazzaro at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA as a post-doctorate fellow.
January 2017
Ruchika joins the lab as a PhD student. :)