The MANDA Lab Odyssey

Today (July 1, 2025) marks the 4th anniversary of the MANDA lab (www.mandalab.org). Some quick reflections.  I had many apprehensions when I started a lab at IIITH. What sorts of memory research can be done with primarily undergraduate researchers who spend 1-1.5 years seriously on research? Can one make meaningful contributions to the field working in a low-resource environment ? Can we build local capacity for doing more ambitious work, especially in cognitive neuroscience, which is what I was trained for? Can we get motivated PhD students who can help us achieve more ambitious research goals, given that they can stay for longer periods of time?  I'm happy to report that the answer to most of these types of questions is trending in the positive direction. Working with IIITH students Our dual degree and MS students have managed to publish in decent conferences ( WACV , CoNLL , Interspeech , CogSci). Two of them have graduated with published papers. One of them is still workin...

The ever-smiling David Huron, an intellectual giant that walked amongst humans pretending to be an alien. I received sad news about Prof. David Huron 's passing yesterday. My one-on-one meetings with David at The Ohio State University were among the happiest and most intellectually stimulating of my life. Let me backtrack a bit.  When I was in my final year of physics studies at IIT Kanpur, I had grown a bit disillusioned with how we were taught science and engineering and had gradually lost interest in pursuing research in physics. At around the same time, I had developed a serious interest in cognitive science through taking courses with another important mentor in my life, Achla Raina . Due to my serious interest in music as an amateur pianist, I considered doing a PhD in music cognition. Since I didn't know where to start, I decided to cold-email a bunch of eminent music cognition researchers. David was one of them, and he responded with the advice to opt for a m...

We finally have the sanction letter for a 2 year grant that will support 2 PhD students. It will also help us get some very minor equipment to implement a very applied project in collaboration with a startup and 3 other universities. It is a good start but we still need to fund some of our exciting basic science work.  On that note, I recently heard a rumor that a cogsci-specific grant (the only one of its kind in India as far as I know) received 12000 applications this year. I sure hope that's just a rumor that isn't true because that was one of the few grants that people in my field could count on. I've had other grants rejected for very strange reasons that suggested that they were not sending them to appropriate reviewers who understood cogsci but this one always gets sent to experts in the field within the country. This time, I suspect that people from other departments applied given that the lines between cogsci and AI have blurred some more in the recent past and eve...

Previous posts have reported on various failures to get grants. Several people on Twitter and elsewhere told me that they were all stepping stones to success. Of course, we've all heard that, but it is quite difficult to believe it when you face rejections.  I'm glad to report that we have finally begun to taste success. The DBT-India Alliance Intermediate Fellowship that was the most heartbreaking rejection for me despite a positive final round experience has now come back to help me, just as people predicted back then. I was able to repurpose some of the ideas in it, and together with colleagues from the department, we submitted a departmental grant application last year on a cohesive theme (which was missing from our previous attempt that was unsuccessful). The panel seemed quite happy with our presentation that was spearheaded by the dept chair. We just got news that we were successful! With DBT-IA, one of my primary goals, in addition to supporting PhD students, was to get...

Laugh and the world laughs with you; Weep, and you weep alone.   -Ella Wheeler in the poem "Solitude" (1883) While this is a famous line that makes sense at a superficial level, my experience in life has taught me that this isn't true. When you want to complain about how things aren't going well and are generally negative, you'll find many people who will commiserate with you and allow you to vent. They might themselves vent to give you company. I find that people generally tend to be tolerant and sympathetic of the misery around them. This is somehow especially true in academia. People love to complain, and people love being in the company of those who complain. I myself got into such loops but have worked actively on myself to get out of such negativity cycles and focus on the positives. I have more work to do on this front still, but I am happy with the steps I've taken to achieve this.  Your "friends" are not your friends if they will not be genu...

I have 2 important postdoc papers to finish and publish, not to mention another paper I started as a PhD student. One of them has already gone through reviews at some good journals but needs some more revisions and work to get more insights into the mechanisms underlying the novel phenomena we had described fairly comprehensively. During my postdoc, I also generated data for several other projects that have now been taken up by other postdocs in my former postdoc lab. So I anticipate some papers to come out of those efforts as well, but what is within my control are these two papers that I am responsible for. For my faculty colleagues reading this, you probably already know how this has gone during my first three years as a faculty member, given the extreme amounts of multitasking one has to do (the postdoc to PI transition is hard for this reason). I was unable to get the needle moving on these papers for 3 years... until now.  As I was grappling with this issue, one of the first ...