One of my pioneer work that also left a legacy in Indian sub-continent is my research interest in defining boundaries of a fish stock as a precursor for conducting stock assessments. Although a large amount of literature and experts were available for tropical fish stock assessments (mostly using length frequency methods described in Sparre and Venema, 1998), I find them a bit irrelevant if the stock structure of the population is unknown. This drived me to do the first (arguable but there were not many) stock identification study in India on Harpadon nehereus which is commonly known as 'Bombay Duck'. Due to cost constraints, this study used landmark based morphometric ('truss') analysis to determine how many stocks of the populations are likely to exist along the coast of India. The study was conducted as part of my dissertation towards a Masters in Fisheries Science from Central Institute of Fisheries Education (CIFE), India.

However, many students down the time line followed these steps and continued working on similar objective but with a variety of different commerically important tropicaln fish species. I estimate around 30-40 research papers on fish stock identification (terms such as stock structure or stock delineation are interchangeably used) have been published until 2024 and continue to do so. I encouraged and mentored a student soon after completing my Masters, the work which was published (Megalaspis cordyla) even before the one that I did for my own thesis.

My interest in fish stock assessments started by volunteering for a project in Central Institute of Fisheries Education (CIFE), visiting fish landing centres in Mumbai on a weekly basis for measuring key commercial fish species. The length data was later analysed in FISAT (FAO-ICLARM Stock Asssessment Tool) to determine important fish population parameters such as growth, recruitment and mortality. The tool was also used to determine the exploitation status of these fish stocks e.g., overfished or not? However, the project was purely academic and therefore remained open in the research world with no link to management of these species.

My involvement with fish stock assessments that really mattered to fisheries management is when I started working for Northern Territory Government in Australia. The job offers a great opportunity for development and improving models for fish stock assessments. I was able to contribute towards 'Status of Australian Fish Stocks (2023)' as a co-author for 5 aquatic species and did assessments for 15 fish stocks in Northern Territory. The job also created opportunity to develop skills in using contemporary packages such as 'Catch-MSY', 'Stock Reduction ANalysis', 'Stock Assessment Continnum' tool and  'Stock Synthesis', the latter which is a widely utilized assessment package across the world. Most of my assessments have been for tropical snapper species such as Golden Snapper, Goldband Snapper, Saddletail Snapper and Crimson Snapper.

Most of my work in this field was developed during my PhD program at University College Cork in Ireland. I feel privileged to have been part of a project that focused on the "Application of Signal Detection Methods in Fisheries Management." The project aimed to explore the use of Cumulative Sum (CUSUM) control charts for monitoring, assessing, and managing fisheries with limited or poor data. At its core, the study addressed the question, Can we manage a fishery with no historical data?

The research resulted in three publications demonstrating that fisheries can still be effectively monitored and managed without historical data, as long as ongoing empirical data collection is in place to build a time series and detect anomalies in the trends. Although CUSUM techniques are widely used in manufacturing for early detection of slow, consistent deviations in a process, their application in fisheries has been less explored—particularly in data-limited contexts, such as when no time series of catch or aging data is available to conduct a full quantitative stock assessment.