Pooja Chand

Background

About Pooja Chand

Having come from a town nestled in Himalayas I was always inclined towards natural history. I'm broadly interested in Plant-animal interactions and evolutionary biology of pollinators. I worked on Community ecology of pollinators for my Master's thesis where I looked at the diversity pattern of pollinators along latitudinal gradient and different land-use systems. Along with that I volunteered a project on conservation of Non-apis bees in Doon valley monitoring stingless bee nests and their Temporal behavior. In between my graduation and post graduation I volunteered in diverse projects like Great Indian Bustard project Black-necked crane Himalayan wolf and participated in number of events viz. Great backyard bird count Wildlife week Spring bird festival Asian water bird census etc. Having grown up and worked in Western Himalayas so far I decided to get the hang of Eastern Himalayas. Hence right after my post-graduation I joined a project "Conservation of Takin in the North-east India" as Research Assistant at Wildlife institute of India. This project gave me an opportunity to explore Mishmi hills and to get accustomed with a challenging field surveys viz. Camera trapping sign vegetation primate and bird survey as well as Socio-ecological survey. By that time I had enough exposure of fieldwork and it was the right time to allign things which interests me the most. This led me to work on another project as Junior Research fellow at Ashoka University which deals with understanding the ecological mechanisms in structuring the Plant-pollinator interactions in semi-arid community. This project gave me a lot of opportunities to explore the oldest range of fold mountain i.e. Aravali hills. This is the ongoing project and I am very much looking forward to enroll in PhD with any lab inside or outside India whose research areas resonates with my area of interest.