Swathi is a PhD candidate in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. Her research focuses on understanding the evolvability -- the capacity of biological systems to adaptively evolve -- of (pathogenic) microbes. In her dissertation, she uses theoretical and experimental approaches to both understand mechanisms that contribute to evolvability and develop frameworks for measuring evolvability. More broadly, she is interested in thinking about the importance of context-dependence in evolutionary biology, both in terms of how context-dependence manifests in our understanding of evolution and the historical and contemporary contexts in which evolutionary biologists develop and engage with theory.