Dr. Gopal Murali’s research interest spans many areas in ecology and evolution pertaining to biological diversity at various scales and organizations. He obtained his PhD in 2020 from the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala. His doctoral research focused on understanding the ecological and evolutionary mechanisms underlying defensive animal colourations and has published several research articles in reputed, peer-reviewed international journals. After his PhD, Dr. Murali was awarded the PBC postdoctoral fellowship for outstanding Chinese and Indian postdoctoral fellows by the Council for Higher Education, Israel (2020). His current work at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel, applies macroecological and macroevolutionary perspectives to characterize processes that underlie various broad-scale biodiversity patterns, and to predict how biodiversity will shift in response to recent environmental change.

Climate change poses a major threat to biodiversity, and there is an urgent need to forecast the effects of climate change on species persistence to inform conservation. During his Fulbright-Nehru postdoctoral research fellowship, in collaboration with Prof. John J. Wiens, Dr. Murali aims to utilize data from recent species’ responses to climate change to incorporate the adaptive capacity of species in climate change vulnerability assessments.