S. No. Name Talk Title
1 Christopher Thompson (University College London) Symmetry breaking, strategic decision making and fair division of labour
2 Christian Kost (Osnabrück University) Emergence of a multicellular life cycle speeds up evolution
3 David R Johnson (Eawag - Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science & Technology, Dübendorf) Bifurcations and the creation of pattern diversity during microbial spatial self-organization
4 E Peter Greenberg (University of Washington) Mechanisms behind the math: quorum sensing control of bacterial cooperation
5 Emilie Søndberg (University of Copenhagen) TBA
6 Glen D'Souza (ETH-Zurich) Environmental nutrient composition dictates solitary to collective behavioural transitions in bacterial populations
7 Kiran Raosaheb Patil (European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Heidelberg) Polarization of microbial communities between competitive and cooperative metabolism
8 Laasya Samhita (National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bangalore) The evolutionary potential of translation errors
9 Mariana Benítez (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City) Cellular differentiation and coexistence in bacterial multicellular aggregates
10 Mohit Kumar Jolly (Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore) Communication and Cooperation in Clusters of Circulating Tumour Cells: The Key Drivers of Metastasis
11 Namiko Mitarai (Niels Bohr Institute, Copenhagen) Persistent coexistence of spatially distributed bacteria and phage
12 P. Jayadev Bhat (Indian Instittue of Technology, Bombay) Melibiose utilisation in S. cerevisiae is a co-operative enterprise
13 Paul Rainey (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, Plön) Ecological scaffolding and the evolution of individuality
14 Punyasloke Bhadury (Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Kolkata) Biogeochemical cycling in coastal oceans- the role of ‘specialized’ bacterioplankton
15 Ratnasri K (Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore) TBA
16 Rupali Sathe (Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Pune) A community approach to vitamin B1 biosynthesis
17 Samay Pande (Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore)
Cooperation and cheating among germinating spores
18 Sandeep Krishna (National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bangalore) The chemical basis of metabolic interdependence
19 Sarahi L. Garcia (Stockholm University) Model microbial communities: Understand niches, interactions and functional redundancy
20 Satoshi Sawai (University of Tokyo) Collective migration in the parallel world
21 Sigal Ben-Yehuda (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) Bacterial nanotubes: conduits for intercellular molecular trafficking
22 Silvia De Monte (École NormaleSupérieure, Paris) Heterogeneity in cell motility and the evolutionary emergence of aggregative multicellular life cycles
23 Sine Lo Svenningsen (University of Copenhagen) Bacterial control of phage susceptibility and prophage induction by cell-to-cell signaling
24 Sriram Varahan (Institute for Stem Cell Science and Regenerative Medicine, Bangalore)

Metabolite plasticity enables the emergence of phenotypically distinct cell states in a clonal microbial community.
25 Sunil Laxman (Institute for Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine, Bangalore) Metabolic constraints determining phenotypic heterogeneity and specialized cell states across space
26 Supreet Saini (Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay) Study of metabolic cooperation, and its impact on speciation in yeast
27 Varsha Singh (Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore) Foraging signal drives swarming in populations of starving bacteria
28 Vidyanand Nanjundiah (Centre for Human Genetics, Bangalore) Many roads lead to Rome: microbial heterogeneity and group living
29 Wenying Shou (Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle) Artificial selection of microbial communities
30 Yuka Shirokawa (University of Tokyo) Cell fate determination in the social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum penalizes precocious reversion to solitary growth