Dharanish

Who am I?

I was born and grew up in Bangalore, a city in the southern part of India, known for its gardens and pleasant weather. I studied both my Bachelors and Masters degree in the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. While my major in both these degrees was physics, I did projects in a wide range of subjects such as theoretical ecology & evolution, computational biophysics, experimental condensed matter physics and molecular biology. Throughout my bachelors and masters study, my interests refined and narrowed until I landed upon the field of theoretical ecology and evolution, which was the subject of my Masters thesis. I love being outside and playing sports like ultimate frisbee, cycling, hiking, and bouldering. While inside, I enjoy playing video games and listening to and producing music.

Research interests

I am broadly interested in understanding what happens when processes of ecology and that of evolution interact in complex ways. I am also interested in understanding how phenomena such as inter and intra species interactions, stochasticity, and spatial structure can affect the dynamics of general eco-evolutionary systems.

The current topic of my doctorate is to understand the learning in animals and the effects of developmental processes, social learning and games on it. Learning is the process of gaining new information or strategies over the course of an animal’s lifetime. I am also interested in how these processes are placed in an evolutionary context. I use the methods of dynamic programming and reinforcement learning to understand these phenomena and answer these questions.

Publications

Jule Neumann, Dharanish Rajendra, Tobias S. Kaiser (2024). “The Free-Running Circasemilunar Period Is Determined by Counting Circadian Clock Cycles in the Marine Midge Clunio Marinus.” Journal of Biological Rhythms, 39(4):379-391. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/07487304241249516

Dharanish Rajendra, Jaydeep Mandal, Yashodhan Hatwalne, & Prabal K. Maiti (2023). “Packing and emergence of the ordering of rods in a spherical monolayer.” Soft Matter, 19(1), 137-146. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1039/D2SM00799A

Dharanish Rajendra, Nikhil Maroli, Narendra M. Dixit, and Prabal Kumar Maiti (2023). “Molecular Dynamics Simulations Show How Antibodies May Rescue HIV-1 Mutants Incapable of Infecting Host Cells.” Journal of Biomolecular Structure and Dynamics, 1–11. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/07391102.2023.2294835

Links

Email address: dharanish.rajendra@uni-wuerzburg.de