Dr Surabhi Ranavat
Postdoctoral Research Associate

Profile

Biography

Surabhi is a bioinformatician with a background in plant ecology and evolution. She has previously worked on ecology, taxonomy, genome assembly, and population genomics of tropical plant species. She is particularly interested in using genomic data to answer questions about plant evolution, adaptation, and historical environmental changes.

Career

Surabhi received her BS-MS dual degree in biological sciences from the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Bhopal (2010-2015). For her MS thesis project (2014-2015), she studied the variation in floral and pollination traits of sympatric Commelinaceae species. She then moved to the University of Edinburgh for a PhD in Evolutionary Biology (2016-2021) where she worked on the taxonomy of Indian Alpinia species and the genetic basis of a unique floral trait termed flexistyly. From 2022-24, she was a postdoctoral researcher at Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium, working on the genome assembly and population genomics of an endangered and inbreeding tree species from tropical Africa (Pericopsis elata).

Surabhi joined BioArCh in 2025 as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in ancient DNA and bioinformatics as part of the NERC Hidden Frontiers project. Her research explores crop adaptation in the circum-Alpine region from the Neolithic to the Iron Age using ancient DNA data.