Dear CEE Community,

Please come join us to hear from Prof Michelle DiBenedetto (UW, Mechanical Engineering) on the importance of surface waves in predicting the transport and distribution of microplastics in the ocean. You can find more about Prof DiBenedetto’s research here:  https://www.michellediben.com. Prof DiBenedetto will also talk about her career path from environmental and civil engineering majors to a faculty position in mechanical engineering.

When/Where: Thursday (12/8): 3:30 Bagley Hall 154 (or on Zoom: http://depts.washington.edu/watersem/)

Microplastics at the ocean surface: waves, turbulence, and particles

Michelle DiBenedetto

Plastic pollution poses a critical threat to the world’s oceans, but critical gaps in knowledge surrounding plastic fate and transport impede remediation and prevention efforts. Much of the plastic in the ocean exists as microplastics. Predicting the behavior of microplastics is non-trivial for two primary reasons: their physical properties (size and density) are fundamentally different from traditionally studied environmental particles like sediment and bubbles, and complex interactions among waves, turbulence, and particle inertia in the ocean surface boundary layer (where most microplastics reside) are not well-understood, especially for buoyant particles such as microplastics. In this talk, I will discuss my career path as well as the importance of surface waves in predicting the transport and distribution of microplastics. I will present results from field observations and laboratory experiments of particles in wavy flows and discuss these in the context of microplastic transport in the ocean.

Bio: Michelle DiBenedetto is an Assistant Professor at University of Washington Seattle in the Mechanical Engineering department. She received her B.S. from Cornell University in 2014 in Environmental Engineering, and her Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2019 in Civil & Environmental Engineering where she studied the behavior and transport of non-spherical particles in surface gravity waves. For her dissertation work, she was awarded the Andreas Acrivos Dissertation Award in Fluid Dynamics from the American Physical Society. Prior to her current appointment, she was a postdoctoral scholar at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in the biology and physical oceanography departments. Her lab at University of Washington uses laboratory experiments, observations, and mathematical modelling to study problems at the intersection of environmental fluid mechanics and particle-laden fl