Celebrating 4 years of MANDA Lab

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 working on a journal paper for which he collected 740+ participants' worth of data for a Hindi word memory study. We expect to submit this paper in a month or two.

We currently have four final-year dual-degree students. Two of them have submitted their theses. One of them also submitted a second, shorter paper validating a claim we made in the earlier CoNLL paper (which, incidentally, just got nominated for best paper). The other two final-year dual-degree students are about to submit a substantial paper to a journal pending some internal edits and revisions. We have accepted only two new dual-degree students in the last few years. Both are serious about their work and have demonstrated genuine interest in the field. One MS student has submitted a paper to a journal, and another one has preregistered her studies and started data collection. Furthermore, she is making important contributions to another major project in the lab. So even if it takes some more time for her to publish her work, she will graduate with substantial research experience and expertise that will set her up for success in grad school and beyond.

One PhD scholar is preparing for her comprehensive exam. She has also piloted a few studies and is preparing to start data collection for both studies. The other two PhD scholars are just one year in and are figuring out their interests, but they have both been hands-on trying various ideas. That is already a good sign. 

Finally, our lab manager/RA has also made important contributions to a few projects, one of which he is writing up for submission to a journal. He has also been instrumental in helping the lab get started on neural dynamics projects, and I'm hopeful that he'll be able to complete one of them before he leaves for grad school sometime next year. 

Building local capacity

After my DBT-IA debacle, I'm glad to report that people were right. They told me that hard work does not go to waste. I adapted some ideas I had proposed for that fellowship to contribute to the DST-FIST grant that the department wrote. I really think that experience of writing the DBT-IA grant, which was the most amount of work I've put into any grant so far, helped (in addition to all the hard work put in by everyone else in the department, including scrambling at 2 am on the day of the interview to arrange for some missing documents!). We are awaiting fund release that will help us build infrastructure at IIITH that will allow us to do more serious neuroscience work. The lab has also secured some external funding and is awaiting news on another grant (after an interview that went well). So there are plenty of reasons to believe, now, that we will be able to do some good cogneuro work at IIITH. It will take some more time to build this capacity, but we're definitely getting there!

Wishlist

On my wish list for the IIITH cognitive science center is hiring good faculty who do more fundamental cognitive science research. We have existing strengths in applied work at the intersection of neuroscience, AI, and healthcare. I would like to see us hire people who do fundamental research in vision, language, attention, emotion, etc. A great cognitive science department needs to have strengths in both fundamental and applied areas. Rigorous, meaningful science does not happen if all we're looking for is one more dataset to apply ML models to to predict mental health, brain connectivity, memorability (what we have done in the lab), etc. 

While these lower-hanging fruits can be good thesis topics for people who don't have time to engage in challenging research topics or as stepping stones towards bigger questions, it is clear that we need to be asking bigger questions. In our own lab, I am really mulling over the idea of neural traveling waves, how they are generated, what they mean for cognition and behavior, how does coordination arise in the brain between waves at multiple scales, etc. We have one new dual-degree student who is motivated to look at one such ambitious question about traveling waves. 

Another question we've been thinking about: How do temporal context dynamics and event segmentation processes during naturalistic experiences come together to determine memory for time and retrospective affective evaluations of experiences? By pushing us to move in such directions, we may publish fewer conference papers, but we will be able to publish some meaningful science every few years.

Overall aspiration

While we can have goals to publish "high impact" papers and rank A*/A conference papers, none of that is really meaningful on its own. I recently came across this LinkedIn post about the difference in quality of training in Indian psychology labs vs. those abroad. Even if we achieve nothing else, if students who graduate from the lab go interview outside, if the interviewers can see the rigor in thinking, statistical approaches, and experimental design and planning that our students bring to the table, I'd say we did our job. Everyone in the lab knows what preregistration is. Many of them have already done it for their projects. They know more than just clicking on options in G*Power to estimate sample sizes. They are able to perform simulations when we use more complex models to compute statistical power at various combinations of experimental design parameters. So if there's one thing I have to be proud of having achieved over the last 4 years, let it be this.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to all the lab members for helping us get to this point. Thanks also to my collaborators who've been really collegial and supportive: Makarand Tapaswi (who, like me, has been thinking about how to ask bigger and better questions) and Neeraj Kumar (with whom we're embarking on some exciting neuromodulation studies in the near future). Many other colleagues at IIITH have helped me in various different ways: Prof. Bapi Raju for advice on grants and other professional matters, Harikumar Kandath for chipping in financially from his grants to help the lab, PK and the PG cell for doing a great job with helping faculty graduate their students, including some cases that are challenging to deal with, staff in the R&D office for helping us get IRB and other applications approved quickly, and many more (sorry if I'm forgetting anyone; it's just that I've learned so much from so many people on campus that it would be impossible to list them all here). I did mention others who helped in the first couple of years here. Oh, I should definitely thank my coffee drug dealers for their important contributions to whatever semblance of sanity I have left: Suryajith and Satish.

All that said, everything has not been all rosy and positive. I have made mistakes as a mentor, both at the hiring stage and beyond. To get better at this job, I applied to and was selected to attend the inaugural Neuroscience Leadership Training Program, which I'm super excited about. I hope the Canadian embassy agrees that it is a good idea for me to attend and grants me a visa soon!