Bhavya Deepti Vadavalli

Bhavya Deepti Vadavalli is a second-year Ph.D student in anthropology. She has interest in translating the basic principles of collective behavior into evolutionary anthropology. She has interested in combining several quantitative methods like social network analysis, GIS, computational modeling and so on. Outside of her academic interests, she likes to embroider and has an interest in art history. To learn more about Deepti Vadavalli’s research and publications, visit her webpage.

In Spring 2024, Bhavya received a CISS Summer mini-grant to attend the Complex Systems Summer School held by the Santa Fe Institute. Learn more in our featured article. In Spring 2025, Bhavya received a CISS Summer mini-grant to support her project exploring the social and ecological factors that determine how semi-nomadic pastoralists in Ethiopia organize their settlements. She is exploring the hypothesis that proximity to other groups, and the subsequent threat of intergroup conflict, lead people to form densely clustered villages and enabling easy collective defense. In the broader context, she aims to provide quantitative, empirical proof that settlement patterns within small-scale societies are shaped by the need for consensus-building. For this, she will use a combination of remote sensing and computational modeling methods. Learn more in our featured article.