Shreya Venkatesan

I graduated with an integrated MS in biological sciences with a minor in data science from the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Thiruvananthapuram where I was selected for the INSPIRE scholarship by the Government of India. My research experience is quite varied, and I have had the opportunity to learn techniques related to molecular biology, behavioural biology and machine learning. In the summer of 2023, I was awarded the Future Research Talent from the Australian National University, under which I was able to work with Dr Megan Head on female mate choice in guppies. My minor thesis, with Prof Hema Somanathan, was to develop an automated pipeline for analysing bee-havioural videos (tracking bees using computer vision). For my Masters' thesis titled 'Influence of insulin resistance on the toxicity of alpha-synuclein fibrils,' I worked in Dr Poonam Thakur's group. At the culmination of my MS, I was awarded the Best Undergraduate Researcher Medal and the School Gold Medal for biology.

"Exploration in the wild: bringing curiosity to the real world"

The idea for my PhD project is to study curiosity in more naturalistic settings, hopefully with the help of machine learning to techniques to understand the different factors that can drive this complex process. I am interested in studying social effects on the curiosity of children, both from caregivers and peers. Another aspect of my PhD will be to study social interactions in non-human primates.

I am extremely interested in science communication, and I did an internship with Prof Ragahavendra Gadagkar at the Indian Institute of Science focusing on writing about scientific topics for the general public. I have also been a part of my institute scientific magazines, both as an editor and writer, and spearheaded the writing team for the biology club which I co-founded.

• Venkatesan, Shreya, et al. "The effect of turbidity on female mate choice in the guppy, Poecilia reticulata." Animal Behaviour 213 (2024): 107-115, The effect of turbidity on female mate choice in the guppy, Poecilia reticulata

• 2023 - Attended the Australasian Society for the Study of Animal Behaviour's conference, Sydney, Australia
• 2022, 2023 & 2024 - Attended the Frontier Symposiums for Biology, Thiruvananthapuram, India