Meet Moritz Laub
“I have always been interested in agriculture. I feel privileged to have the possibility to travel to Sub-Saharan Africa and collaborate with the locals.”
Let’s meet Moritz Laub, postdoctoral researcher in the SAE group. Moritz is from Germany and graduated in Agricultural Science at the University of Hohenheim (Germany). He obtained his PhD from the same university where he worked on improving the representation of the soil organic matter cycle in agroecosystem models. Currently, he is studying the pathways of soil organic matter formation and destruction in agroecosystems in the tropics.
When did your interest in tropical agricultural systems begin?
“Since I was a child, I developed a connection to agriculture by spending time on my uncle’s farm. After an exchange in Mexico, I started to find the tropics very fascinating and decided to focus on these landscapes during my master’s. During my studies and my PhD, I also had the opportunity to travel to Thailand to study organic matter cycling in the field via long-term experiments.”
What did you start working on when you joined the SAE group?
“I initially focused on a long-term field trial in Kenya to study how external inputs contribute to soil organic matter cycling with the final goal to improve soil fertility and carbon sequestration. I have also worked in the LANDMARC project which focused on the sequestration of atmospheric carbon in different ecosystems. In both projects, I simulated the development of carbon stocks at different scales.”
What do you find inspiring about your job?
“First, I value the goal of scientific research, which aims at understanding the world and discovering new aspects of it. With these discoveries, we could ideally contribute to solving some global problems, such as the loss of soil fertility. Secondly, I like the way my job challenges my curiosity, and I enjoy the research process itself, which consists in starting from a basic idea and finding ways to test or implement it. Also, the combination of computer and field work suits my personal interests.”
What have you learned from the work you carried on so far?
“I learned to run workshops with stakeholders in the LANDMARC project, which helped me to get closer to reality and to the application of our research. I could also see with my own eyes how politics and wrong market incentives could influence the opinion that people have about the results of this type of research. Lastly, I learned to simplify modelling concepts to make them more available to students and stakeholders.”
If you want to know more about Moritz’s research, visit the following websites: SOM trials project, external page LANDMARC project and REGSOMMICS project.
You can contact him via e-mail for more questions:
