SCIoI member Tamal Roy wins best poster award at Berlin PostDoc Days 2025

By: Maria Ott

SCIoI postdoctoral researcher Tamal Roy has received this year’s Best Poster Award at the Berlin PostDoc Days, an annual two-day conference that brings together postdoctoral researchers from across Berlin’s universities and research institutions.

The Berlin PostDoc Days highlight innovative research conducted by postdoctoral fellows, fosters interdisciplinary exchange, and supports professional development across scientific disciplines. Each year, the event attracts around 150 postdocs from a wide range of fields and engages all major research institutions in the Berlin area. The program combines keynote talks, scientific presentations, poster sessions, networking events, and workshops focused on career pathways, science communication, and emerging tools such as machine learning.

Tamal was recognized for his poster “Fisheries can evolutionarily change fish behavior and cognition,” which addresses how fisheries as a human-induced selection pressure can shape fish behavior and cognitive traits over evolutionary time.

A behavioral biologist by training, Tamal is interested in the evolutionary consequences of novel selection pressures caused by human activity. He obtained his PhD in Behavioral Ecology from the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Kolkata, where his doctoral research focused on how physical and social environments influence behavioral types and cognitive abilities in zebrafish. As a postdoctoral research associate at Arizona State University, he investigated how native and rearing environments contribute to the development of color biases and their potential impact on cognitive flexibility.

Tamal later shifted his focus toward the evolutionary implications of human-induced environmental change. Supported by a postdoctoral fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, he joined the Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries (IGB) Berlin, where he studied the behavioral and evolutionary implications of size-selective mortality typical to most commercial and recreational fisheries, using experimentally harvested zebrafish populations. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Science of Intelligence (SCIoI).

Within SCIoI, Tamal works on Project 52: “Evolution of collective cognition through individual-level selection.” His research investigates how size-selective mortality shapes individual cognition in zebrafish, how these changes scale up to affect collective cognition, and what consequences this has for individual and group fitness. Combining behavioral experiments with agent-based modelling and swarm robotic experiments, the project aims to understand how individual-level evolutionary adaptations influence group-level outcomes under novel selection pressures.

The Best Poster Award at the Berlin PostDoc Day recognizes outstanding scientific communication and research excellence among early-career scientists. Tamal’s award highlights the relevance of his work at the intersection of behavioral biology, evolution, and collective intelligence, the core themes of Science of Intelligence.

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