Teaching
I currently teach 3 courses at IISER Pune.
BIO335 - Animal Behaviour (co-taught with Dr. Anand Krishnan and Dr. Nixon Abraham)
This course deals with the study of why animals behave the way they do and how they produce behaviour. The course is divided into two parts - the first part, Behavioural Ecology, deals with the "why" questions and the second part, Neuroethology, deals with the "how" questions.
I teach a large portion of the Neuroethology part, where we focus on the neural basis of natural behaviour. I introduce different neuroethological model systems (sound localisation in the barn owl, song learning and production in songbirds, prey capture in the American toad, etc.) and discuss the general principles that we have learned about nervous system function through the study of these model systems.
As part of this course, students are expected to carry out a semester-long project on an animal of their choice. The project involves observing behaviour (preferably in their natural environment), generating hypotheses about a particular behaviour, designing and carrying out experiments to test the predictions of these hypotheses.
BIO354 - Neurobiology II (co-taught with Dr. Suhita Nadkarni)
This course is an advanced neurobiology course that discusses sensory systems, motor systems and higher cognitive functions.
I teach the first half of the course where I discuss the neural mechanisms underlying the different sensory systems. I focus on the visual system to capture details of how visual information is transduced and different features of the world are represented in different visual areas. I then briefly discuss the other sensory systems highlighting similarities and differences with the visual system.
BIO310 - Biostatistics (co-taught with Dr. Pranay Goel)
This course deals with statistical analysis of biological data with an emphasis on analysing real biological problems.
I teach half of this course and discuss statistical measures, probability, confidence intervals and the basics of hypothesis testing. I also teach basic usage of R for data analysis.
