Vikram read Biological Sciences at Balliol College, Oxford. He then moved to The Rockefeller University in New York to do a PhD with Daniel Kronauer, studying the evolution of colony life and complex social behaviour in ant societies.
He discovered that ancient differences in brain insulin signalling underlie the division of labour between ant queens and workers, and that army ant mass raids evolved as an emergent consequence of massive expansions in the colonies of their ancestors.
Next, to study the origins of brains and complex animal behaviour, he moved to Mansi Srivastava's lab at Harvard University. Vikram developed the acoel Hofstenia miamia as a new neuroscience model, discovering that it has a new kind of brain: resilient to dramatic injuries, performing distributed computation, yet capable of sophisticated behaviour. At Harvard, Vikram has been supported by funding from a Jane Coffin Childs postdoctoral fellowship, the NIH's BRAIN Initiative, and the Harvard Brain Initiative Postdoctoral Pioneer Award.
Vikram will start his group at The Francis Crick Institute in March 2027, where he will use Hofstenia as a model to study how a brain can perform distributed computations, and how brains and complex behaviour first evolved.
