Darwinian Dilemmas of the Pandemic Century

Imroze is an Assistant Professor of Biology at Ashoka University and a DBT-Wellcome Trust Intermediate Fellow. He is an evolutionary biologist with a special focus on understanding the selective forces that determine adaptive evolution of immune responses. His research combines diverse approaches – the use of experimental evolution and life history analyses, physiological and molecular manipulations to assess evolutionary and ecological outcomes. Among his other interests is to study the parallelism between evolutionary concepts and the cultural history of the world, and integrating the two within the framework of liberal education.

He believes that evolutionary biology is a discipline that easily straddles the domains of natural sciences and humanities: it is a subject with historical implications and often has to grapple with the challenge of having to derive logical inferences from natural ‘experiments’ without the luxury of replication in reality, as is the case with history. He did his Bachelors in Chemistry at St. Xavier’s College, Calcutta and Masters in Biochemistry at University of Calcutta. He did his doctoral studies in Evolutionary Biology at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Kolkata. Before joining Ashoka, Imroze was a postdoctoral fellow at National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bangalore and a visiting researcher at the Free University of Berlin.