PhD Student spotlight: Emily Stevenson

Above: Emily Stevenson on the beach wearing her Beach Guardian jacket. Beach Guardian is an environmental NGO she co-founded with her dad, Rob Stevenson. Image credit: Plymouth University

We first asked Emily to tell us a little bit about her PhD and what it involves.

“The title of my PhD is “Microplastics as vectors for antimicrobial resistance in aquatic systems’. I have just started my third year (over half way now, eek!) and my PML supervisors are Professor Pennie Lindeque and Dr Matt Cole, and I also have 2 supervisors at the University of Exeter: Dr Aimee Murray and Professor Angus Buckling.”

“My PhD is focused on the microbial reefs that grow on microplastic particles in aquatic environments. These communities have been named “the Plastisphere‘, and have been found to be distinct to microbial communities that are free-living in the water or sediment, or even those attached to natural debris.”

Emily has just published her paper “Culturing the Plastisphere: comparing methods to isolate culturable bacteria colonising microplastics’, access it here >>

“The concern with this that we are investigating is whether, where we have these unique communities, if microplastics act as hotspots for pathogenic or antimicrobial resistant bacteria. To do this, we are doing a mixture of lab based and environmental experiments, exploring if “bad’ bacteria choose to attach to microplastics over control materials, whether microplastics have a role in influencing the evolution of antimicrobial resistance and, finally, what are the wider ecological implications of this?”

We then asked if there are certain parts of the PhD that she particularly enjoys.

“To be honest, I absolutely love it all! I thought that I would prefer the fieldwork elements of my research, as I initially trained as a marine biologist and always loved being out in the field. But my affinity for lab work has really surprised me!”

Above: Emily conducting research at the Environment and Sustainability Institute, University of Exeter

Then we asked Emily to tell us about how she came to decide to pursue a PhD.

“It’s a bit of a long story, but in a nutshell, when I finished my undergraduate, I started an NGO called Beach Guardian, which aims to tackle plastic waste by empowering communities. Through this work, I began to see that there was always going to be a group of people that I couldn’t engage with just by focusing on the environmental impacts of plastic, because not everyone cares about wildlife!”

Above: Emily with her Beach Guardian litter picking volunteers

“So, to get people interested from a different angle, I started looking at the human health impacts of plastics, and this is when I came across some of the first evidence which showed E. coli was present on microplastics on bathing beaches.”

“From discovering this, I was at first concerned that I was putting my volunteers at risk on beach cleans, but was also really invested in finding out more. As a result, I came back to academia for my masters, which is when I first met Angus and Aimee – and they agreed to supervise a master’s research project with me to see what was going on.”

“Within the first few months of this work, we started to see that there was something interesting here, and we started looking at whether I could keep researching this is in more detail for a PhD. It was then that we approached Pennie and Matt at PML, and formed the awesome team that we are now, and we able to seek out funding for this project that we all designed together. I’ve been very lucky and I’m incredibly grateful for all of my supervisor’s support, and also the support of our philanthropic donors and institutions.”

Emily has joined and strengthened a hugely successful team on the issue of plastic pollution. Plymouth Marine Laboratory and the University of Exeter have won multiple awards for their combined research on plastics – along with the University of Plymouth – including the Blue Planet Prize and the Volvo Environmental Prize. We next asked Emily how her research fits into or complements existing research, and where she hopes to see her research progressing into the future.

“I think what is unique about this work is that Pennie and Matt were not really exploring the Plastisphere, and Aimee and Angus were not conducting research on microplastics, so in merging all of our expertise, we’ve been able to investigate something pretty novel and from a unique approach.”

“I hope that, in the future, we can continue growing our research expertise on this topic, but also more closely aligning with some of the other research projects at PML, including looking at organism exposure to microplastics and associated bacterial communities, and assessing the impacts on marine food webs.”

It’s obvious that Emily is incredibly passionate and talented in both her studies and with her work with Beach Guardian, but she’s also very successful in science communication – bringing environmental issues into the public eye. Just this year, she’s featured on Radio 4’s Women’s Hour, Good Morning Britain, and BBC Spotlight – to name just a few! We asked her to tell us what tips and advice do she have for scientists when it comes to communicating science, getting it out into the public and in front of people?

Watch video: Emily speaking on Good Morning Britain on the issues of plastic pollution