Hemal flying drone at Blackbuck National Park, Gujarat.

Hemal Naik flying a drone in Gujarat, India during the fieldwork for project MELA (Mating Ecology of a Lek-breeding Antelope) in 2022.


Engineer turned ecologist working at the intersection of technology, wildlife and art.

I use AI to study behavior across insects, mammals and birds. Currently, I am a post-doc at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and University of Konstanz. My primary projects involve blackbuck, baboons and Siberian jays etc. ⇩

What’s new?

Science : Our CHIRP dataset, the largest dataset to solve AI enabled individual tracking in wild birds is accepted in CVPR 2026, pre-print coming soon

Art : My sketches and MELA documentary were exhibited at the science bazaar organized by the Oxford Brooks University