Team
Mehrnoush Soroush
Director of CAMEL Lab, Assistant Professor of Landscape Archaeology
Mehrnoush Soroush is a landscape archaeologist who examines the intersection between urban and water history in the Ancient Near East. She received her Ph.D. from the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW) of New York University and her MA in Architecture from the University of Tehran, Iran. She has previously worked in cultural resource management and the software industry and is strongly interested in making her academic practices relevant to contemporary society.
Mehrnoush’s research focuses on the resilience of ancient cities in adapting to environmental changes and socio-political developments by adopting new hydraulic strategies and technologies. She employs interdisciplinary approaches drawing on a broad set of data, including archaeological fieldwork, textual and archival research, Geographic Information Systems (GIS), remote sensing, and related computational methods.
Dominik Lukas
Supervising Research Assistant, Graduate Student at the Department of Anthropology
Dominik Lukas is a researcher on the development of field-recording databases for social sciences, archaeology, and cultural heritage, particularly interested in the role these systems play in producing scientific knowledge. After earning his MA in prehistoric archaeology at the University of Leipzig (Germany), he worked at the German Archaeological Institute (DAI) and the Excellence Cluster Topoi in Berlin (Germany) as well as the Çatalhöyük Research Project at Stanford University. Since 2019, he has been a Doctoral Student at the Department of Anthropology.
At CAMEL, Dominik is tasked with managing the Lab and lending general support in all aspects of computational methods in research.
Harrison Morin
Research Assistant, Graduate Student at NELC
Harrison Morin is a Ph.D. student in Near Eastern Art and Archaeology, specializing in the archaeology of Central Asia. His research focuses on the archaeological landscapes of Central Asia during the Kushan period and explores questions related to settlement patterning, cross-cultural exchange, mobility, urbanism, and empire. He holds an MA in Anthropology from the University of Chicago’s Master’s Program in the Social Sciences and a BA in International Relations and History from Saint Anselm College. Additionally, he has participated in several excavation projects in places such as Uzbekistan, Italy, and Iraqi Kurdistan.
Harrison has been a member of the CAMEL Lab since 2019, where he started working as a research assistant for the Afghan Heritage Mapping Partnership. His current responsibilities at the lab include managing and coordinating data procurement requests and overseeing and administering all Afghanistan and AHMP-data-related requests and proposals. Harrison also serves as a committee member for the 2023-24 CAMEL Fellowship program on modeling movement.
Çağlayan Bal
Research Assistant, Graduate Student at NELC
Çağlayan Bal is a PhD student in Near Eastern Art and Archaeology, specializing in Anatolian archaeology. Her research interests include understanding long-term human-environment interactions, understanding identity in the archaeological context, and applying GIS and remote sensing techniques in archaeology. She holds a BSc in Environmental Engineering from Middle East Technical University (METU, Turkey), a BA in Protohistory and Near Eastern Archaeology from Ankara University (Turkey), and an MSc in Settlement Archaeology from METU (Turkey). She has participated in several excavation projects in Turkey. She was recently a member of the Konya Regional Archaeological Survey Project (KRASP, 2017-2022) between 2017 and 2022 and the Türkmenkarahöyük Intensive Survey Project (TISP, 2021-2022).
Çağlayan’s responsibilities at CAMEL include managing requests for fieldwork equipment rentals and mapping projects as well as CAMEL’s public outreach events in collaboration with ISAC. She organized a workshop, Beginner Level Mapping with Open-Source Software (QGIS), in spring 2023 and is also a committee member in this year’s CAMEL fellowship program on modeling movement.
Christian Borgen
Research Assistant, Graduate Student at NELC
Christian is a PhD student in the Cuneiform Studies program of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations studying the socioeconomic history and geography of ancient Mesopotamia. His current research focuses on the analysis of 3rd millennium BCE archives to reconstruct the development of labor organization. He received his BA in Classical Studies and Philosophy from the University of Minnesota and his MA in Middle Eastern Studies from UChicago’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies. Christian has experience with excavation and survey projects in Israel and Iraqi Kurdistan.
At CAMEL, Christian manages the map collection and database along with facilitating data requests.
Yuwei Zhou
Research Assistant, Graduate Student at EALC
Yuwei Zhou is a PhD student in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, specializing in Bronze Age Chinese archaeology and paleography. Her research utilizes spatial and statistical tools to examine built environments and identity formation in the ancient city of Anyang, China. She holds a BA in History and BS in Mathematics-Computer Science from the University of California, San Diego (2020), and an MA in EALC at the University of Chicago (2023). She has worked closely with several museum collections and participated in excavation projects in China.
At CAMEL, Yuwei is primarily responsible for managing learning opportunities, including workshops and fellowship opportunities.
Joseph Harris
Research Assistant, Graduate Student at NELC
Joseph Harris is a PhD student in NELC in the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East program. He researches the archaeology of the Late Prehistoric Near East, and is most interested in Pre-Pottery Neolithic culture.
Joseph completed his B.A. at UNC Chapel Hill and afterwards spent an Affiliate year at University College London’s Institute of Archaeology. He has worked on several archaeological projects, including in Turkey, Jordan, Greece, Israel, Iraqi Kurdistan, and North Carolina.
Joseph’s interests in landscape archaeology concern site patterning, resource acquisition, movement, and exchange in the Late Prehistoric Near East.
Jiayue Wang
Research Assistant, Undergraduate Student
Jiayue Wang is a second-year undergraduate student. Her specialty is performing data analysis and interpretation using Geographic Information System (GIS)-based tools, such as ArcGIS and QGIS. Jiayue has the ability to do research in archives and transfer historical and archival data to the digital realm. At the moment, she is mainly working on the Anatolian Atlas Project. This project involves a comprehensive exploration and mapping of the Anatolian region, incorporating archaeological and geographical data from different surveys.