Home | Shloka V. Janapaty

Shloka V. Janapaty sj9547 [at] princeton [dot] edu

Hello! I’m a PhD student in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton coadvised by Lars Hedin and Simon Levin. Prior to graduate school, I received my bachelors degree in Applied Math from Columbia University. My research is supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and the Robert May Fellowship at Princeton.

The kind of ecological theory I enjoy most is:

low-dimensional: what is the simplest description of this problem that explains the most variance?
cross-disciplinary: where different fields interface and new applications arise
meaningful: provides fundamental insight into animal welfare, vulnerable biogeochemical stocks, and other neglected problems

I am particularly interested in using tools from mathematics and computer science to examine:

resource acquisition strategies in plant community assembly, especially in nutrient poor soils
resource allocation strategies in wild animals, especially phenotypic plasticity in life-history strategies on short evolutionary time scales.

You can find my blog here!

Digital Shelves

To Read

Fiction

Mistborn: The Well of Ascension by Brandon Sanderson
Mistborn: The Hero of Ages by Brandon Sanderson

Science, History, and Philosophy

Communities and Ecosystems by Robert Whittaker
Geographical Ecology by Robert MacArthur
Community Ecology by Jared Diamond and Ted J. Case
Real Patterns by Daniel C. Dennett
Evolution Illuminated: Salmon and Their Relatives by Andrew Hendry and Stephen C. Stearns

Past

2026

**Mistborn: The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson

2025

**Slow Productivity by Cal Newport
The Search For Modern China by Jonathan D. Spence
**The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki
**The Bitter Lesson by Rich Sutton
**Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
**Rapt by Winnifred Gallagher
**The Decameron by Giovanni Bocaccio
**Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
**Common Sense by Thomas Paine
Trophic Ecology by James E. Garvey

2024

**The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
The Unified Neutral Theory of Biodiversity and Biogeography by Stephen P. Hubbell
**The Enchiridion by Epictetus
**The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu
**The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu
**Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction by Philip Tetlock
**Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
Good Economics for Hard Times by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo
**Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport
**The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch
**Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor by Yossi Klein Halevi
**Situational Awareness by Leopold Aschenbrenner
**CFAR Participant Handbook by Duncan Sabien
**Freud's Megalomania by Israel Rosenfield
Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh by Shrayana Bhattacharya
**D'Aulaires' Book of Norse Myths by Ingri and Edgar Parin d'Aulaire
**All The Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
**Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick
**The Mind-Body Problem by Rebecca Goldstein
**Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri
**The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli

2023

**Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann
**A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle
**The Stranger by Albert Camus
Theory of Zipf's Law and Beyond by Alexander Saichev
**The Sunset Limited by Cormac McCarthy
**Remainder by Tom McCarthy
**Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman
**No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
**The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert