Quadri Popoola, a second-year doctoral candidate in the Department of Statistics at Rice University’s George R. Brown School of Engineering and Computing, delivered his inaugural research presentation at the national meeting of the Ecological Society of America in Baltimore, Maryland on August 13, 2025.
Popoola was invited by his mentor, Frederi Viens, professor of Statistics at Rice and the lead researcher of the “Sustainability of Agrarian Societies in the Lake Chad Basin” project, to present his research in the conference session titled, "Agroecology in the Global South.”
“Being invited to present at a major international conference is a rare opportunity for an early-stage graduate student and I’m thankful to Professor Viens for this significant professional milestone,” Popoola said. “While I was excited, I was also nervous to present my first scientific talk in front of leading researchers in the field. But Professor Viens kindly and patiently guided me through the entire process which I found very helpful."
Viens leads a newly formed “SustainabilityLakeChad Group”, an international consortium of researchers studying the dramatic fluctuations in Lake Chad’s water levels since the 1980s. Lake Chad—a vast but shallow freshwater body at the crossroads of Nigeria, Niger, Cameroon, and Chad—is essential to the livelihoods of tens of millions in this semi-arid and impoverished region. The group aims to understand why the lake’s levels vary so widely from year to year and season to season, and how these shifts impact nearby farming and fishing communities. A central focus is documenting the mitigation strategies used by residents in Nigeria’s northeastern Borno and Yobe states, which make up much of the Lake Chad Basin, and identifying simple, sustainable solutions to help communities adapt to unstable water resources.
In spring 2024, when Quadri Popoola was admitted to the Ph.D. program in Rice’s statistics department, he expressed interest in participating in research to Rudy Guerra, professor and then-chair of the department, who connected him with Viens. Although Popoola is from Lagos, Nigeria’s bustling metropolis, the country’s vast linguistic diversity meant that the remote rural regions surrounding Lake Chad where Viens conducts his research were quite foreign to him. However, motivated by the same desire as Viens to understand rural sustainability in the misunderstood region of his home country, Popoola eagerly dove into this research effort.
Popoola and Viens co-presented their analysis and findings from an extensive survey they conducted in April 2024 of 1,000 rural stakeholders which included farmers, fishermen, and pastoralists in Borno and Yobe states. One of the most significant results Popoola found is that all members of the rural communities they surveyed agreed on the need to dig more wells and boreholes to increase the availability of water to local areas. To aid in the implementation of this solution, Viens and his team are studying its long-term environmental impacts and sustainability in the context of the basin’s underlying hydrology, and accounting for future scenarios of climate variability.
"Quadri is one of the finest graduate student researchers in our department and he was a fantastic co-presenter,” Viens said. “Our talk generated significant interest among ecological researchers with several productive discussions. Since most of them are based in the US and not familiar with the Lake Chad region in Northeast Nigeria, our presentation provided valuable introduction and insights into the ecological problems in that area, highlighting the importance of such community-based statistical studies and the tremendous impact they can have on improving the lives and livelihoods of agrarian and fishing communities in Africa’s Eastern Sahel and other arid regions around the globe.”
Under the supervision of Professor Adam Lawan Ngala, a senior member of the consortium and a prominent soil scientist from the University of Maiduguri in Borno, research assistant, Plangnan Damshakal, led a second survey of the same rural stakeholders this month. Responding to farmers’ requests during the 2024 surveys and focus groups, Ngala also launched a major soil sampling campaign to help farmers understand identify which crops are best suited to local conditions. In the coming months, Viens, Popoola and other members of the team at Rice plan to analyze the data from the survey and soil sampling campaign to provide a comprehensive understanding of the agro-ecological sustainability in the Lake Chad Basin.
Read an article published in Nigeria’s This Day national newspaper about the Sustainability Lake Chad group and their work.
Photo Caption: Pictured above from left to right are:
- Frederi Viens, Ph.D. (Rice University, Houston TX, professor of statistics) [Speaker]
- John Vandermeer, Ph.D. (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor MI, Asa Gray Distinguished University Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor) [Organizer and Moderator]
- Sieglinde Snapp, Ph.D. (CIMMYT {International Center for Maize and Wheat Improvement}, Mexico City DF, Mexico, Director of Sustainable Agrifoods Systems) [Speaker]
- Maria Catalina Villalpando-Paez (University of California at Berkeley, Ph.D. student in the Energy and Resources Group) [Speaker]
- Estelí Jiménez-Soto, Ph.D. (University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, associate professor of geography and environmental sciences, Leader of the Living Agroecology Lab) [Speaker]
- Quadri Popoola (Rice University, Houston, TX, Ph.D. student in the Department of Statistics) [Speaker]