Shiva Thapa

About

Who I am

Hi :) My name is Shiva. I like road-trips and photography. I also like cooking; however, it is more like conducting experiments - sometimes it works, and most of the time it fails!!!

What I do

I am a second-year PhD student co-advised by Drs Kasie Raymann and Louis-Marie Bobay in the Department of Biology, at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. My research interests lay at the union of emergent properties of complex systems - such as microbiome - and bioinformatics. My current research is focused on understanding fine-scale processes governing host-associated microbial dynamics within the honey bee gut.

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Work

Microbial Community Assembly and Functional Dynamics

Studies have shown that host-microbes interactions affect diverse aspects of host physiology ranging from development and growth to conferring immunity. This could mean positive or negative effect upon hosts’ fitness. However, despite playing a crucial role in dictating host lifestyles, the factors shaping the microbial acquisition and assembly; interactions and maintenance is not well deciphered.

My current research aims to understand the fine-scale processes governing host associated microbial community and functional dynamics using experimental evolution, strain-level metagenomic profiling and in-silico community modeling.

Predator-Prey Coexistence Dynamics

I got my master's from the East Tennessee State University, Johnson City, TN - a beautiful town tucked away in the northeastern TN mountains - where I studied modeling of complex systems under Prof. Dr. Istvan Karsai. My work there was focused on understanding the emergence of complex coexistence dynamics within predator-prey populations in-silico using Agent-Based Modeling (ABM; Netlogo) and statistical computing.

Contact

You can reach out to me @ s_thapa3 at uncg.edu. Thank you :)

Elements

i = 0;

while (!deck.isInOrder()) {
    print 'Iteration ' + i;
    deck.shuffle();
    i++;
}

print 'It took ' + i + ' iterations to sort the deck.';