Team Bio

Our team brings together diverse expertise in biology, ecology, literature, and anthropology. Ananya Mukherjee specializes in microbiology and will look at soil health and microbial diversity. Achyut will focus on the distribution of plant species in study sites. As a sociologist Eveleen will carry out the ethnographic fieldwork to create a knowledge repository. Neha will accessibly archive the information and aim to tell the stories of the communities.

Ananya Mukherjee

Ananya is an Assistant Professor at Azim Premji University, Bhopal. Her doctoral thesis focussed on the carbon dioxide-concentrating mechanism(CCM) in green algae like Chlamydomonas. Currently she is aiming to identify more components of the CCM using CRISPR editing. She also works on the effect of above-ground vegetation on the soil microbiome of urban spaces in Indian cities. Additionally, she works on using CRISPR in diverse undergraduate classrooms and research to equip biologists of the future. She is passionate about STEM pedagogy, accessible science education, and innovative science outreach.

Eveleen Kaur Sidana

Eveleen Sidana is an Assistant Professor at Azim Premji University, Bhopal, where she teaches Sociology.

As an ethnographer she works at the intersection of spaces, media and digital technologies. She is enthusiastic about urban markets and city streets and exploring the spontaneity of urban spaces and cultures. She has critically analyzed the relation between the ubiquity of digital technologies and the pandemic in urban spaces. . Along with her colleagues she is interested in the systematic archiving of the knowledge and practices of the tribal communities in the Pachmarhi biosphere reserve creating a repository of the ethnobotanical knowledge from the perspective that the forests and the tribal communities are intertwined as part of the same place.

Neha Yadav

Neha has a Master of Arts (MA) in English Literature from the University of Delhi and a Bachelor of Arts (BA) in the same from Miranda House. Her PhD thesis, submitted to BITS Goa, concerns a new form within Indian Writing in English (IWE) - The Indian Graphic Novel - and explores its relationship with an emergent professional-managerial class in the wake of the economic reforms of 1991. She has previously worked for the digital media startup The Quint and continues to write extensively for new media platforms like The Wire, Scroll, Agents of Ishq, Strange Horizons and EPW Engage. In 2023, she was shortlisted for the Rama Mehta Writing Grant for short fiction. She is passionate about democratizing knowledge through accessible archiving.

Achyut Kumar Banerjee

I am a plant ecologist with Bachelor’s and Master’s Degrees in Botany from the University of Calcutta, Kolkata. I work in the domain of Biological Invasion, one of the main components of global change. My research aims to understand the dynamics of the invasion process, starting from the introduction of an organism into a new environment to its ability to cross different barriers to become an invasive species. In line with the interest of my postdoctoral research group, I also worked on the phylogeography of several mangrove species distributed in the Indo-West Pacific region.

My studies are focused on countries of the Global South and provide practical and easy-to-implement – a) management measures for the invasive species and b) conservation insights for the threatened mangrove taxa. I have published 42 research papers in international peer-reviewed journals.

I love reading books (with a bias for historical nonfiction) and capturing the natural world (with a bias for flower and macro photographic genres).