Broadly, I seek to understand the proximate mechanisms underlying the expression of behavior, specifically the ones that facilitate consistent patterns of behavior within populations/strains of the same species. During my PhD, I focused my research on sexual behavior and developmental plasticity, where I investigated the neural and molecular mechanisms that regulated the observed plasticity in behavior in natural populations by doing RNA-seq. I am interested in how sexual conflict is resolved in a system where both males and females display different levels of aggression due to either natural or artificial selection. Additionally, the genomic basis of aggression in this species is being researched using different approaches from hormonal to genomic analyses by comparing the described strains. More recently, my research interests spanned to behavioral changes due to micro and nanoplastic pollution, and how these are mediated by differences in gene expression at different developmental stages.

Genomic and physiological mechanisms of aggressive behaviour; Transcriptomics of intralocus sexual conflict; Genome editing using the CRISPR tool kit; microplastic pollution