Nishant Kumar is a DPhil student and Felix scholar at the University of Oxford, and a Senior Research Fellow at the Wildlife Institute of India (WII). He is supervised by Drs. Andrew Gosler, Fabrizio Sergio, and Profs. Yadvendradev Jhala and Qamar Qureshi. He studies the urban ecology of the Black Kite Milvus migrans in Delhi, a heterogeneous capital and the fastest growing mega-city with 25 million human inhabitants. Kites, a human commensal bird of prey in the Subcontinent, offer a unique opportunity to study the urban adaptations of a top trophic predator (e.g. population ecology, behavioural ecology, spatial ecology, ethnic relations, etc.). Since his MSc at WII, his team has imparted research training to 85 undergraduate students, conservation education to the more than 30,000 citizens in streets, and inspired 200 top meritorious school children through demonstration of research protocols in association with Delhi University and the Dept. of Science & Technology, Government of India. Nishant is the Christian Howey Raising Scholar for the year 2017.
Kumar, Nishant
