Microplastics: Small Size, Big Challenges

This presentation will briefly summarize the current state of microplastics research including: what they are, how they are being identified, the rate of expanding research, microplastics and biomonitoring, and how they are currently understood to behave in certain environments. Our microplastics work at the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) is aimed at producing literature reviews focused on human health and exposure as well as establishing collaborations. We will give a live demonstration of our unique data visualizations, Hub for Interactive Literature (HILs), which allow researchers to navigate through the figures and references from our microplastic reviews. HILs are especially useful in helping users to home in on specific microplastics aspects. Finally, we will show who and what ATSDR is as an organization and how students can get
involved.