Current and future environmental levels

Pillar Leader: Gunnar Gerdts, Alfred Wegener Institute

Gunnar Gerdts is the head of the Marine Microbiological Ecology - Microplastics group of the section Shelf Seas Systems Ecology at the Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research. He has been working for several years on the occurrence of microplastics in several environmental compartments (e.g. water, sediments, biota, sea ice, snow) in different geographical areas (e.g. North Atlantic, Arctic, Antarctica) by using advanced spectroscopic techniques (e.g. FTIR Imaging, nanoFTIR, Raman microscopy).

Alessio Gomiero, NORCE

Alessio Gomiero - is a Senior Researcher at NORCE and honorary associate researcher at CNR -IRBIM. His background is analytical chemistry, ecotoxicology, and environmental risk assessment. Since 2013, he has moved from the development of combined ecological-ecotoxicological and chemical oriented approaches assessing the oil and gas industry to the study of plastic pollution. He has contributed to the development of vibrational spectroscopy and thermo-analytical oriented analytical methods to characterize microplastics in terrestrial, freshwater and marine environments as well as investigating the biological effects of microplastics on different model organisms. He is involved in several national and international research projects related to microplastic and is a member of expert groups in relation to marine pollution and plastic litter. He acts as NAMC scientific coordinator supporting the development of the Centre.

Amy Lusher, NIVA

Dr Lusher is a Key Research at the Norwegian Institute for Water Research and an adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Bergen. Over the past 10 years, Amy has been focusing on the development of methods for microplastics in environmental samples and consequences for marine biota. She is currently the Scientific Project Manager of EUROqCHARM, a EU H2020 funded CSA, driven by the need for validated and harmonised approaches to quantifying plastics. She previously co-led the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) report focusing on microplastics in fisheries and aquaculture (finfish and shellfish). Within NAMC she is leading Pillar Three which focuses on understanding how humans are exposed to microplastics through the air, water and food​.

Eivind Bastesen, NORCE

Guttorm Alendal, University of Bergen

Guttorm Alendal is professor in Applied and Computational Mathematics at the University of Bergen, Norway. He has been working with Carbon Capture and Storage related research since the 1990’s, mostly concerned with impact and monitoring aspects related to leakage of stored CO2. He has been involved in a number of national and international projects on the theme, both as coordinator and participant. From 2008 to 2013 he was member of the program committee for the Climit program under the Research Council of Norway.

Helge Avlesen, NORCE

Helge Avlesen works as a researcher at the Climate department of NORCE in Bergen. He has spent most of his career working on research and development projects in numerical ocean modelling, on scales ranging from the Norwegian Sea down to laboratory scale, and most of the spectrum from practical applications of models to pure model development. Funding has been from the Norwegian Research Council, EU, local authorities and some industry. In the NAMC effort focus will be on modelling work to predict hotspots for microplastics in the surface of the fjords near the city of Bergen.

James Clark, Plymouth Marine Laboratory

Anna Oleynik, University of Bergen

Anna Oleynik's main research interests are mathematical modelling, dynamical systems, optimization, and marine monitoring. She has a long experience in mathematical analysis of neural field models, and a more recent interest in inverse problems, optimization methods, numerical analysis and simulations.  Anna Oleynik is a part of the Academia agreement project: AMOFF, Assurance Monitoring for Offshore CO2 storage sites; a member of the ACTOM project team on developing a web-based toolkit that will collect algorithms for optimal monitoring design for offshore CCS; and a collaborator of the FACTS project on predicting microplastic distribution and localizing plastic aggregation zones, based on numerical models and simulations.

Eva Ramirez-Llodra, REV Ocean

Eva is the Science Coordinator at REV Ocean. She is benthic marine ecologist with 20 years of research experience in deep-sea ecosystems. Her main areas of interest are deep-sea benthic biodiversity and early life-history processes, with a particular focus on faunal and ecosystem responses to human impacts, including plastic pollution. Eva has a wide expertise in international project management, including leading roles in the Census of Marine Life programme, the International Network for Scientific Investigations of Deep-Sea Ecosystem (INDEEP), the Deep-Ocean Stewardship Initiative (DOSI) and in IUCN expert commissions. She has an established international network of contacts within science and other stakeholders and contributes to facilitating science communication to end users, including policy makers, NGOs and society.

Carol Anne Clayson, WHOI