Spring20_Mag_Combined_WEB_single_pages

SPRING 2020 // 9   45:00 town’s materials recovery facility for a day to gain an understanding of the process and its importance to the community. Conlon is set to graduate this spring. Originally from Portland, she said growing up in the Pacific Northwest had a formative impact on why she is pursuing her work to begin with. PSU’s emphasis on sus- tainability made it a natural choice for her, especially since it offered unique opportunities through the Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) program. IGERT was a nationwide fellowship through the National Science Foundation (NSF) that included five years of tuition remission. It was the flagship effort of the NSF to educate future American natural and social scientists in areas beyond their discipline until the agency discontinued the program. “The faculty and students that were involved in the IGERT program were able to continue their research and engagement without that framework because PSU had long built its graduate programs around engaged scholarship in the first place,” said Aaron Golub, associate professor and director of PSU’s School of Urban Studies and Planning. Golub serves as Conlon’s dissertation committee chair and principle adviser. PSU’s different programs and their relationship with the city showed Conlon the truth behind the school’s motto, “Let knowledge serve the city,” and it made the university an ideal option to host her research. “(PSU) seemed like a perfect fit for me because it really helped push me into being actively engaged,” she said. “I wanted a Ph.D. not to get stuck in academia, but to serve the public.” JENNIFER LADWIG, a graduate assistant in the Office of University Communications, is working toward her master’s in book publishing. SEEING SCIENCE: YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT Text by Cristina Rojas | Illustration by James Wilson Tiny threads of plastics are showing up in Pacific oysters and razor clams along the Oregon coast—and the yoga pants, fleece jackets, and rainproof clothing that Pacific Northwesterners love to wear are a source of that pollution, according to a Portland State University study. Britta Baechler, a Ph.D. student in PSU’s Earth, Environment and Society program, and Elise Granek, a professor of environmental science and management, studied microplastics in Pacific oysters and razor clams with support from Oregon Sea Grant. While they found plastics in all but two of 300 samples from 15 sites between Clatsop and Gold Beach, spring oysters contained by far the most. The researchers concluded that synthetic clothing worn in winter and spring may have been a factor. When this clothing goes through the wash, plastic threads shed from it—up to 700,000 strands per load of laundry—and travel through wastewater out to estuaries, where the tide meets the stream and oysters are feeding and growing. Special washing machine filters might help interrupt this process, Granek said, but they are still in the early stages of development. More research needs to be done to determine what effect microplastics have on the oysters and clams, as well as the humans who eat them.