Induja is a postdoctoral fellow working with Prof. Ehud Meron on the Resilience project titled ‘Community Assembly and Spatial Pattern Formation’. Her research primarily focuses on modeling and understanding ecosystem responses to environmental stress and identifying possible interventions. She investigates phenotypic transitions in plants as a mechanism for stress tolerance. During her Ph.D., she studied critical transitions in complex systems, mainly focusing on early warning signals and scaling relations. She has also developed a diagnostic system for predicting the emergence of oscillatory instabilities in turbulent fluid mechanical systems.

Research Project

Induja studies how dryland ecosystems adapt to increasing climate stress and avoid tipping into dysfunctional states. Her work focuses on phenotypic changes in plants—how plants adjust their traits such as root structure or leaf area to cope with water stress. Using mathematical models, she explores how these adaptive responses can help ecosystems evade collapse to bare soil, even under sudden droughts. She also investigates how different adaptation mechanisms, such as phenotypic plasticity and spatial pattern formation, interact to enhance resilience. This research aims to uncover strategies for sustaining ecosystem function and stability in a changing climate.