The fieldwork of our MORSL postdoctoral researchers is featured on the website of the Office of international Affairs.

Sarah Laborde, Department of Anthropology, and Sui Phang, Department of Evolution, Ecology, and Organismal Biology, were recently in Cameroon working as postdoc researchers with an interdisciplinary team on the “Modeling Regime Shifts in the Logone Floodplain” (MORSL) project, which aims to study and model the interplay of social and ecological dynamics in the Far North Region of Cameroon. The project especially focuses on the proliferation of a fishing technique – the digging of canals to catch fish when the flood recedes – that is changing the waterscape of the floodplain. The research is a collaborative effort between anthropologists, geographers, ecologists, hydrologists and computer scientists from The Ohio State University and the University of Maroua, in Cameroon.

Laborde and Phang are both international scholars working on the MORSL research team in Mark Moritz's lab. Laborde is originally from France and completed her PhD in Australia while Sui is from Singapore. Moritz, an associate professor in Anthropology, serves as principal investigator along with co-principal investigators Michael Durand, Ian Hamilton, Bryan Mark, and Ningchuan Xiao on the Exploring Social, Ecological, and Hydrological Regime Shifts in the Logone Floodplain of Cameroon project that receives funding from the NSF Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems (CNH) program.