By: Alaska Pacific University
Published: June 26, 2024
NASA is awarding approximately $5 million to Alaska Pacific University (APU) to help build the Microplastics Research and Education Center. This award was made possible through the Minority University Research and Education Project Institutional Research Opportunity (MIRO). The award enhances capabilities in the sciences and increases workforce diversity, supporting APU’s goal to serve Alaskan communities in its science programs and mission to provide culturally responsive educational programs in partnership with our students, communities, and tribal partners.
The Microplastics Research and Education Center at Alaska Pacific University will contribute to the research and education needs of Alaskan communities through the exploration and detection of microplastics in Alaskan waterways, with a particular focus on traditional drinking water sources, urban and rural watersheds, glaciers, coastal waterways, ocean column, and high-altitude depositions of microplastics.
Microplastics have been detected in almost every ecosystem globally and in subsistence foods and waterways in Alaska. However, scientists have yet to determine how much these contaminants are in the waterways in Alaska and how much they might impact human, animal, and ecosystem health. The Microplastics Research and Education Center at APU adopts a “One Health” approach to this endeavor, honoring Alaska Native Traditional Ways of Knowledge and braiding this important relationship and understanding of these lands with Western science methods.
A photograph of microplastics obtained by student Na’vid Khizri at 6 meters under the ocean surface in Smitty’s Cove, Alaska using the Fourier Transform Infra Red Microscope.
This program encourages APU students to bring their communities’ knowledge into the sciences, supporting a powerful collaboration with NASA scientists. Our goal is to provide aspiring environmental scientists opportunities to make discoveries that will enable them to continue to serve their communities and NASA environmental science missions. The Microplastics Research and Education Center at APU will offer opportunities for internships, tuition stipends, and funded research projects, including collaborations with NASA scientists and scientists across academic institutions in Alaska and the University of Michigan, to students in the Marine and Environmental Sciences program at APU.
In the first years of the project, the principal investigator, Dr. Dee Barker, with APU collaborators Nate Anderson and Dr. Jason Geck will collaborate with Dr. Denise Thorsen of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Dr. Chris Ruff of the University of Michigan, and Shelly Moore of the Institute of Plastics Research in California, a California Water Board-accredited laboratory for microplastics detection. These collaborators will support the building of instrumental capacity of the Alaska and Arctic Waterways Analytics (AAWA) lab at APU to the level of expertise of microplastics-accredited labs in California. This collaboration will also build capacity at APU for remote sensing ocean surface anomalies associated with microplastics, using Dr. Ruf’s methods and NASA’s SWOT satellite system that flies over Earth’s polar regions.
