Wildlife Institute of India Archives

Dr. Aashna Sharma is Senior Project Associate at the Wildlife Institute of India (WII), Dehradun. She completed her B.Sc. (Hons) in 2011 and M.Sc. (Hons.) in 2013 in zoology from Panjab University (PU), Chandigarh. She has a Ph.D. from the Department of Zoology, PU and the Wildlife Institute of India (WII), under joint supervision of Dr. Y.K. Rawal and Dr J.A. Johnson. Her doctoral research focused on assessing the climate change and invasion impacts on native Himalayan fishes, and on developing state-of-the-art models for their conservation.

Dr. Sharma has worked in various capacities at WII, contributing to the assessment of climate change impacts on various taxa of lotic ecosystems. She qualified the UGC-NET and GATE exams, apart from receiving several honors and awards, including the Best Popular Science Story award under the DST-Augmenting Writing Skills for Articulating Research (AWSAR) and best oral presentation awards at various research seminars. She has served as an invited speaker for various national and international seminars. Dr. Sharma is also Review Editor of Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.

Large-bodied freshwater fauna or megafauna are witnessing extensive declines in the Anthropocene, and climate change is expected to exacerbate the situation owing to their extinction-prone traits. Their defaunations are more feared in nations like India that are biologically diverse yet anthropically populous. Through the Fulbright-Kalam Climate fellowship for Postdoctoral Research, Dr. Sharma aims to identify conservation hotspots for megafauna in India by assessing the impacts of future climate and land-use changes.

Dr. Ashish Jha is currently employed as Scientist C at the Wildlife Institute of India, Dehradun. Prior to this, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Mohali (2022-2023) and worked as a research associate at Kerala Agricultural University Thrissur (2021-2022). He has an MTech in biotechnology from IIT Kharagpur (2014) and a BTech in biotechnology from NIT Raipur (2012). He is a recipient of competitive national fellowships such as GATE, CSIR-NET and SERB-NPDF.

Dr. Jha obtained his Ph.D. from CSIR-CCMB Hyderabad for his work on biogeography and population genetics of South India endemic and globally threatened yellow-throated bulbul (Pycnonotus xantholaemus). After his Ph.D., he worked on the Kerala Bird Atlas project and studied avian diet via stable-isotope analysis. He is interested in avian conservation using multi-pronged approaches including genetics, long-term monitoring, field-based natural history studies and community outreach.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Research fellow at the Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA, Dr. Jha is empirically testing the core-periphery hypothesis using Nearctic birds as a model system. This study aims to generate empirical support for the core-periphery hypothesis by quantifying external phenotypes and genomic variation across populations in multiple avian species, leveraging the power of museum specimens.