Shreya Venkatesan

I graduated with an integrated BS-MS majoring in biological sciences with a minor in data science from the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Thiruvananthapuram. During this period, I was partially funded by the INSPIRE scholarship from the Government of India. In the summer of 2023, I was awarded the Future Research Talent from the Australian National University, under which I was able to work with Dr Megan Head on a behavioural ecology project focussed on female mate choice in guppies. My data science minor thesis, with Prof Hema Somanathan, was to develop an automated pipeline for analysing 'bee'-havioural videos (tracking bees using computer vision). For my Masters' thesis titled 'Influence of insulin resistance on the toxicity of alpha-synuclein fibrils,' I worked in Dr Poonam Thakur's group, studying how diabetes can influence the risk of Parkinson's. At the culmination of my MS, I was awarded the Best Undergraduate Researcher Medal and the Biology School Gold Medal. These varied experiences have given me the opportunity to learn techniques related to molecular biology, behavioural biology and machine learning, which leads me to look at science from an interdisciplinary lens.

"The influence of social environments on children's curiosity"

The central objective of my thesis is to understand how social partners and social cues can influence curiosity in children across development. To this end, I intend to explore how caregivers and peers can have an effect on children's curiosity. Some of my ongoing studies focus on whether popularity, when presented as peer preferences, can influence children's choices and exploration behaviour; how parent speech varies as they read books to their children which they perceive to be of differing interests to their child; and how joint attention varies in Indian parent-child dyads during free play with novel and familiar objects.

I am curious about how children acquire information via social learning from their environments, and how interactions with peers can shape their learning opportunities. In the future, I also hope to extend this research on curiosity to different species and cultures, since I believe that understanding this behaviour beyond the typically represented frameworks is vital to developing robust, applicable theories of social learning.

• Venkatesan, S., Madhavan, R., & Mani, N. (2025, September).Vocal Dynamics of Caregiver-Child Interactions During Shared Book Reading Sessions.
• Bothe, R., Isbaner, S., Chen, X., Venkatesan, S., Kagan, I., Gail, A., & Mani, N. (2026). Little scientists & social apprentices: Active word learning in dynamic social contexts using a transparent dyadic interaction platform.
• Bothe, R., Isbaner, S., Venkatesan, S., & Mani, N. (2026). Maternal information sampling targets children’s knowledge gaps.
• Mahlke, A. K., Venkatesan, S., & Mani, N. (2026).Parent Speech in Free Play Is Guided by Infant Attention, but Organised by Object Familiarity.
• Venkatesan, S., Chung, M. H. J., Moura-Campos, D., & Head, M. L. (2024). The effect of turbidity on female mate choice in the guppy.

• April 2026 - Visiting Researcher, Social Interaction Lab, Stanford University
• March 2026 - Workshop: Data Simulation in R, Dr. Roger Mundry
• October 2025 - Göttingen Cognition Forum: Curiosity & Interaction, Göttingen. Poster: Venkatesan, S., & Mani, N. 'The Influence of Popularity on Children’s Curiosity'
• September 2025 - IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning, Prague. Talk: Venkatesan, S., Madhavan, R., & Mani, N. 'Vocal Dynamics of Caregiver-Child Interactions During Shared Book Reading Sessions'
• September 2025 - Computational Social Cognition (Birmingham-Leiden Summer School)
• August 2025 - Lancaster Conference on Infant and Early Child Development, Lancaster. Poster: Venkatesan, S., & Mani, N. 'The Influence of Popularity on Children’s Curiosity'
• March 2025 - Workshop: Linear Models in R, Dr. Roger Mundry
• October 2024 - Machine Learning for Early Environments (COST-ACTION)