What does it take to build a digital environment where students actually thrive?
Dr. Robin Sharma joins the pod to discuss his journey from Mathematics to the forefront of EdTech and game-based learning. Don’t miss this deep dive into learning science!
open.spotify.com/episode/1wtJ...
KSENIIA PETROVA (Harvard clawed frog embryo computational biologist) wins her Vermont habeas case on partial summary judgment: the Court finds the cancellation of her visa was arbitrary and capricious and must be set aside, and therefore the revocation of her visa is set aside.
Sobering and depressing story about the awful conditions faced by several international students, and how this stems from the terrible politics behind university fees and immigration.
www.theguardian.com/education/ng...
New publication on ant communication from DAP listener, Dr Joshi. Do check it out!
The petition didn't actually they the academics command "street cred" in a court of law ?! 🧐
www.thehindu.com/news/nationa...
📍Please add us!
From observing birds and spiders in Bangalore to studying the soil ecology of Australia, our latest episode follows Dhruti’s incredible academic journey!
We dive into her transition from studying botany/zoology to her PhD research on microbial ecology.
open.spotify.com/episode/1P5E...
Very telling that the Union government is attempting to go back to colonial-era laws with expanded medical surveillance, policing, and fearmongering.
Who is this for? Not the transgender community, clearly:
www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/s...
🏳️🌈
Desi Academia Podcast’s Golden Jubilee episode is now live🌟!
We talk to Dr. Saurabh Singh about his journey as a mathematician. We talk about the pursuit of truth, mathematics’s place within and outside academia, and the intrinsic value of pure science.
open.spotify.com/episode/2QDg...
This Body is doing such a great job besmirching India’s image, why import foreign talent for that job.
scroll.in/latest/10907...
It's almost time for a fantastic conversation on mathematics, 'labless science', and seeing the world in an elegant way!
mandir ka diya bujhne ka dar tha yahaan toh koi moot ke hi chala gaya.
Mood rn.
In my new Substack post, I write about ‘this survived the brutal Portuguese rule’ hook for Insta reels and the algorithmic flattening of Goan history. open.substack.com/pub/kaustubh...
Previous episodes:
bsky.app/profile/desi...
We start Season 11 and 2026 with insights into a serious question: what if your chosen research path is beyond a PhD ?
We are joined by Harsha to continue the story of his research journey- onto an industry career:
open.spotify.com/episode/16aF...
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/s...
It's time for Season 11, and we start 2026 with a discussion on resilience and grace.
Harsha joins us again to share how he navigated a career shift when his academic program failed him, the harsh reality of funding games, and the price PhD students pay for systemic problems.
Pre-print alert 🚨🐜!!!
I am really excited to share results from the first empirical chapter of my PhD. We ( @dornhaus.bsky.social and I) set out to examine how fire ants deal with perturbations to communication during foraging. Turns out their foraging is not robust to this perturbation. (1/5)
🎙️ Happy New Year to all!
In this episode, Vatsal & Megh are joined by the friend of the pod Dr. Rituparna Patgiri (@Rituparna37) who talks about teaching sociology to STEM grads, her mentorship philosophy and the many roles of a teacher.
🎧 Tune in!
open.spotify.com/episode/3D6Y...
I would not have made this connection.
Species declared extinct in 2025.
Includes 3 bandicoots (marsupials, not closely related to the Indian bandicoot rat)
news.mongabay.com/short-articl...
Unconventional data viz is the best! thanks for the inspo with this post.
Would you be open to a podcast pitch? we would love to connect with you.
gaah it’s the kind of graph that is so satisfying to knit or crochet.
Aditya, Megh, and Vatsal are back to discuss Vatsal's second postdoc (this time outside his alma mater), working on a different disease and with human tissue
We also talk academic HR, dry lab privilege, 9-5, RTO, and much more!
open.spotify.com/episode/7spN...
It’s here!! ✨
Megh, Aditya, and Vatsal are joined by Indranil @academicmargin, as we discuss Megh’s dissertation research. We talk about cooperation, support systems, linguistics, and the impact of AI on the field.
Check out the episode:
open.spotify.com/episode/19Vq...
It's season 10 (Yes, we can't believe it either!) and the OG gang gets together after a long time to vent about all things academia.
In this episode of Desi "postdoctoral" podcast, we catch up with Aditya, talk about our lives post PhD and much more!
open.spotify.com/episode/50Uk...
✈️📚 Ever tried explaining your research to an immigration officer?
In this DAP episode, Manan & Sumaira join us to talk about trans-continental poetry, periodicals, studying Islamic communities and what exactly is Islamic studies!
open.spotify.com/episode/0p88...
Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues.
Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).
Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.
Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles
Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...
We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n
Any researchers or scholars thinking about Return to India should first try and post in support of our peers.
I mean, they operate in defiance of the law, and it is a civil (not criminal matter) right? I'm based out of the US, and I have not had any trouble using it...
But it would be nice to live in a world where these shitty paywallers did not exist.
