The first requirement for joining our group is that you must be someone who is fascinated about behavior and evolution, wondering about why and how animals do certain things in a certain way. You should also be primarily driven by the theoretical basis of behavior and be excited about designing clever experiments to test your ideas. If your idea of doing behavioral research is primarily doing “field work” in pretty places, our lab is not the right place for you, I am an experimentalist and reductionist at heart. Having said that, we have however recently begun some comparative work with tropical honeybees in India.
If you join our group, you will either do experimental work that is rooted in behavior, physiology, neuroethology, or modeling using computer simulations. Although experience in any of these skills is always a plus, it is not a must. While I practice a mentoring policy where I am always available for you to provide ideas and guidance, I expect you to develop a research question that is as much yours as it is mine, and even push the envelope to completely new directions. This means that I will not give you an “all worked-out” project idea, you will need to put in a lot of sincere, hard work – thinking, reading, discussing, and ultimately doing stuff. My students generally publish one paper a year and this requires you to be on the top of your game all the time. The general work schedule will look something like this: You start working in the lab the summer before your official fall admission date and learn what we do and how we do it. You then spend your first two semesters developing a solid (though not set in stone) research proposal for the next few summers and from then on, you do a project each summer and work in the fall to analyze the data and send out a manuscript for publication. In this way, I expect you to graduate in 5 years with 4-5 papers behind you if you are a Ph.D. student and in 2.5 years with 1-2 papers if you are a Master’s student, an expectation that my students regularly meet. I expect my graduate students to be independent-minded who can run their projects largely on their own without an army of undergraduate helpers (because my undergraduate students are largely busy doing their own projects). My expectations from my students are quite high – so you need to be prepared for giving your absolute best – intense is the word some people have used to describe how it is feels working in our group.
For undergraduates looking for research experience:
If you do not want to be a mere helper in a lab but want to do some actual independent research, my lab could be the right place for you. I have few undergraduates in the lab and they generally do small independent projects. You will begin by being an apprentice in the lab, helping on an ongoing project and learning about what we do. By the end of this time if you like what we do, you are going to be put in charge of a small project which you will run largely on your own or with another undergraduate student. Almost all undergraduates who have worked on an independent project in the lab has a peer-reviewed publication to boast of and I intend to maintain this tradition.
If this philosophy is what you are looking for in a program and you would like to discuss working in the lab, contact me by email and tell me about:
1. What are your broad research interests? What are the SPECIFIC questions about our research that interest you?
2. What kind of skills do you have? Do you have actual experience with any of the research we do?
3. Why do you want to pursue graduate studies? What kind of career are you seeking?
4. How is your academic record? What kind of coursework have you taken?
If you think you are interested in working with our group, visit our lab creed page to see how we work.
I would also encourage you to contact my current and former students and ask them about their experience (to get the lowdown on me).