Freshwater Colloquium – Fate of Plastics in the Environment: From Legacy Pollutants to Emergent Materials

Plastics are a pervasive part of everyday life and a central challenge in the environment. Environmental stresses such as sunlight, temperature fluctuations, wet/dry cycling or microbial forces affect the longevity or degradation of plastics. Assessing the fate of plastics under these stresses allows us to accurately predict the service lifetime of plastics used in infrastructure (or evaluate the extent of the plastic pollution problem. This talk will center around some of the fundamental chemistry questions the Maurer-Jones group asks around how plastics degrade and what are the implications for them in the environment. Insights my group has made we will be a jumping off point to explore some questions or concepts around the future of plastic materials.

Melissa Maurer-Jones did her BS in chemistry at University of St.Thomas in St. Paul MN and completed a Chemistry Ph.D. at University of Minnesota – Twin Cities working for Dr. Christy Haynes where she studied the toxicity response of mammalian and bacterial models to engineered nanoparticles. She went on to do a postdoc with Dr. Kris McNeill at ETH Zurich studying the environmental photochemistry of a plastic material. Melissa has been at UMD since 2016 where she is currently an Associate Professor in the department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and Director of Graduate Studies for the Chemistry MS program.