Rate My Professor Kartik Shanker

Kartik Shanker is Professor and Chairperson at the Centre for Ecological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. He earned his Ph.D. from the Centre for Ecological Sciences at the Indian Institute of Science. Shanker has held positions at the Indian Institute of Science since 2006, serving as Associate Professor from 2006 to 2020 before his promotion to Professor in 2020. His research focuses on the distribution of diversity at various levels of organisation, from genes to ecosystems, and at scales from local communities to macro-ecological regional scales, primarily in terrestrial habitats of the Western Ghats and other parts of India, as well as coastal and marine systems. Specializations include community ecology and macroecology of diversity and distributions, historical biogeography, phylogeography and phylogenetics, and marine turtle biology and conservation. Shanker studies model systems such as small vertebrates in forest systems and coastal and marine fauna, combining field ecology, phylogenetic information, and ecological modelling to understand evolutionary and biogeographic patterns and support conservation prioritisation. He has also examined large-scale altitudinal and latitudinal patterns using integrated models incorporating neutral theory, ecology, and evolution, with projects on mixed foraging flocks of birds, distribution patterns of birds and plants, phylogeny and biogeography of snakes and frogs, and diversity of coastal and marine invertebrates. Additional work addresses marine turtle biology and conservation, including studies of leatherback turtles in Little Andaman Island, olive ridley turtles in Orissa, green turtles in the Lakshadweep islands, population biology, genetics, foraging ecology, and potential impacts of climate change on sex ratios. Shanker is involved in research on the political ecology of conservation, conflict, and natural resource management in coastal and marine systems, collaborating with local communities through Dakshin Foundation, of which he is a founder trustee. He established Current Conservation magazine to bridge conservation research and art. Shanker is the author of the book From Soup to Superstar, a historical account of sea turtle conservation in India. He has supervised numerous doctoral theses on topics including dispersal patterns in littorinid snails, lineage delimitation in frog genera, assembly rules in mixed-species bird flocks, systematics and biogeography of vine snakes and pit vipers, species ranges and richness of trees in the Western Ghats, and bird species distribution in the Western Ghats. His contributions include over 100 journal articles and other publications, with an h-index of 32 and thousands of citations.