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The National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC) invites proposals for collaborative team-based synthesis research (pursuits or workshops) around emerging SES topics. We encourage proposals that synthesize data, develop and apply models, and couple quantitative and qualitative data/information in new ways.  

SESYNC is excited to welcome our newest postdoc Lee Mordechai! Learn more about Lee and his SESYNC research project.

I was home in South Africa in 2016 when a friend arrived for dinner, happy to have avoided mosquito bites on a recent trip to Zambia but angry to have seen the same insecticide-treated bed nets they slept under being used to catch fish. In 2017, there were an estimated 219 million cases of malaria in 90 countries, with 435,000 deaths, 93% of them in Africa​. Insecticide-treated bed nets are estimated to have averted 450 million malaria cases in Africa between 2000 and 2015, the largest contribution among the interventions assessed. More than 1.2 billion bed nets have been distributed in Africa since 2000­, and an even greater flow of nets will be needed to achieve the World Health Organization’s goal of reducing malaria incidence by 90% by 2030.

It’s a searing summer day on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, and in chest-high waders carrying 30 pounds of soil on your back, the humidity is almost unbearable. We have spent long hours in the field and the lab as a budding undergraduate and graduate researchers, wading through wetlands and tromping through fields for the sake of “research.” The question arises in each of us – “Why am I doing this?”