• Biodiversity – Patterns, Processes, and Conservation
• Remote Sensing
• Radar Aeroecology
• Photogrammetry and Deep Learning in Ecology
• Community Ecology, Functional and Phylogenetic Ecology
• Role of Intraspecific Variation in Community Assembly

Mansi is a part of the Undergraduate Programme.

She is a quantitative ecologist. Her research focuses on developing novel tools and pipelines for assembling, curating, and analysing large datasets in ecology especially for monitoring insect communities, especially moths. 

In her most recent postdoctoral work at the University of Liverpool, UK her research with Jenny Hodgson focused on identifying connectivity bottlenecks in different habitats across England. 

As part of her previous research at the University of Leeds (UK), she developed an innovative analytical toolbox that can help quantify aerial insect abundance using weather radars. Signals of insects, birds and bats are routinely captured by weather radars but are discarded as ​“noise” by meteorological scientists who are primarily interested in weather-related signals (like rain, hail, snow and wind). Mansi’s work allows robust quantification of meaningful ecological signals from this ​“noise”, providing a benchmark in large-scale biodiversity monitoring. 

During her postdoc, she also served as the Principal Investigator for Data Study Groups at the Alan Turing Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence. 

During her PhD with Ramana Athreya at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Pune, she developed a novel method to estimate morphological traits for moths from images, without the need to collect specimens. 

Her work revealed that an important group of moths – the hawkmoths – increase in size as the elevation in the eastern Himalayas increases. It also reinstated the importance of considering intraspecific variability, or the variation across individuals within a species, when studying trait-environment relationships in nature. This work was recently featured in a Sandbox Films’ documentary Nocturnes (2024) which won the Sundance Film Festival award. 

Mansi’s ongoing research focuses on developing image classification tools to identify morpho-species from the extensive digital library available from her moth monitoring work in Arunachal Pradesh. With the help of vertical-looking radars, she is also interested in setting up an aero-ecology programme focused on insects in central India. 

Mansi enjoys spending time with the local Bugun and Sherdukpen communities around her ecological field sites.