Ronak Waghe is a Master's Student at James Cook University, Townsville, Australia. He comes from a Coastal City called Mumbai in India which also houses two of the major fish landing sites of the country. Ronak has always been fascinated by marine ecosystems but earlier was very much interested in wildlife biology. It was during his undergrad where he was exposed to the vibrant marine diversity in Mumbai through tidepooling by a group called Marine Life of Mumbai (MLOM), which is when he wished to change his field to Marine Biology. Moving forward in his undergrad, he had the lovely opportunity to work for Miss Zoya Tyabji (Phd Candidate Dalhousie University, Canada) for her PhD in which he collected morphometric, tissue samples and landing data of various elasmobranchs.

 

In addition, Ronak has volunteered for WWF, TRAFFIC (India) where he developed E-manuals which will be used for training in law enforcement agencies, aiding them in the identification of illegally traded wildlife goods by linking the derivatives with the corresponding species. Ronak chose to stick to his smelly fish markets that he so dearly missed after being a year in Townsville. Ronak has been working with Miss Zoya Tyabji to this day, and one of his recent projects include working on the understanding the functional brain morphology of various elasmobranch species that are landed in Mumbai.

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Ronak's interests lie in assessing the habitat distribution, age and growth,  bycatch management, conservation and in recent times to better understand different aspects of the brain of elasmobranchs. This lead to Ronak using Torpedo Sinuspersci biological data as part of the project with Zoya and indent to use it for a sperate study with Dr. Jonathan Smart and the Fish and Fisheries Lab.