Payal attributes her beginnings as a (quantitative) ecologist to her father’s extensive collection of National Geographic magazines, her mother’s academic drive, and a letter she received at the age of 7 from the New Jersey Wildlife trust in response to her letter to Gerald Durrell asking him what she could do to save animals.

Fuelled by dreams of being a field ecologist in exotic places, she now finds herself working with models and big data. She currently builds global models to predict the impacts of economic and land-use change on biodiversity, and is involved in a national scale project for Australia to assess the impacts of the recent 2019 bushfires on invertebrate species. Payal has also worked on indicators and monitoring methods for biodiversity, spatial data analyses, and human-elephant conflict.