Anusha Shankar
she/her Assistant Professor Tata Institute of Fundamental Research
Anusha Shankar focuses her research on how animals manage and balance their time and energy and how they respond to environmental differences, such as across elevation, rural-urban gradients or warming temperatures resulting from climate change.
Shankar started by studying energy management for the whole organism — measuring how animals manage their time and energy when their environment changes. Now, she integrates genetic and cellular-level perspectives into her work. She uses thermal videos to measure body temperatures and measures the oxygen consumed in the breath of an organism to get at their metabolic rates. She is pioneering the integration of whole-organism physiology of free-living animals with molecular approaches to understand how animals like hummingbirds, sunbirds and nightjars manage energy. Shankar discovered that hummingbirds can move flexibly between shallow and deep torpor overnight by changing their body temperature and metabolism to save energy to different levels. Understanding torpor from cellular to organismal to evolutionary scales can help us better understand animals’ physiological functions that manage energy.
Eager to share insights from science, Shankar is committed to science communication. She participates in science communication initiatives with National Geographic Society, BrainChem (& Ecology), Science Outside and more.
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