Microplastics Sensor

With my colleagues at Applied Ocean Sciences and Scripps, we are working on a Phase II NSF grant, through the America’s Seed Fund program, to build a first-of-its-kind flow through microplastics sensor. This work came out of frustrations during my PhD at how time-consuming microplastics analysis currently is. By creating the first flow through sensor that could give a near real-time abundance measurement of microplastics, the UltraPlastics Sensor could make the process orders of magnitude faster, easier, and cheaper than it is now. This work would allow scientists, drinking water providers, monitoring facilities, conservation organizations, and health professionals to quickly measure water worldwide for microplastics, a process that currently can take hours to days per sample.

This work was recently featured in Scientia Magazine, and received very positive reviews (a picture of the article is above). The tweet featuring this article has been viewed over 77,000 times. This work is currently patent pending, and still under development, but we are already in talks with potential collaborators and customers to expand the capabilities and use cases of the UltraPlastics Sensor.