Rate My Professor Maria Thaker

Professor Maria Thaker is a faculty member at the Centre for Ecological Sciences at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. She was appointed Assistant Professor in 2012, promoted to Associate Professor in 2020, and to Professor in 2025. Her research focuses on predator-prey interactions, the macrophysiology of stress coping responses, physiological and behavioral ecology of animals, and movement ecology. She leads the Macrophysiology Lab, which employs an integrative approach combining animal behavior, physiology, ecology, and evolution to study how animals adjust behaviorally and physiologically to environmental challenges across multiple scales.

Thaker holds a Ph.D. and has supervised doctoral theses on topics including multimodal signalling in diurnal geckos, dynamic colour change in lizards, and urbanisation effects on lizard phenotypes. Her work emphasizes field studies with reptiles and landscape-level analyses involving mammals, such as elephant movement decisions and mesocarnivore coexistence in human-dominated areas.