This site will list speakers at the Symposium.

Keynote speakers:

Theme: Impact – toxicology and ecotoxicology

Dr. Jennifer Provencher is the Head of the Wildlife Health Unit at the Canadian Wildlife Service in Environment and Climate Change Canada. Her research examines issues affecting the conservation of wildlife species with partners, including plastic pollution both as a physical and a chemical contaminant in the environment. She has published numerous peer-reviewed papers on plastic pollution interactions with wildlife in the Pacific, Atlantic and Arctic oceans. Her main research programs are in Nunavut, Canada where she first became involved in Arctic research during the 2007-2008 International Polar Year. Her work is focused primarily on Arctic ecosystems where she works with Indigenous communities to develop and implement harmonized monitoring programs to track and understand plastic pollution in the environment. She is the co-chair for newly formed Litter and Microplastic Expert Group under the Arctic Council’s Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program (AMAP), and is a member and chairs a number of national and international working groups and committees focused on plastic pollution.

Theme: Transport and transformation

Melanie Bergmann is a senior deep-sea researcher at the Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research. Having found a temporal increase in plastic debris on the deep Arctic seafloor, she established the FRAM Pollution Observatory whose aim is to quantify plastic pollutants in all Arctic ecosystem compartments and delineate temporal trends. Her work has yielded a number of scientific papers in high-quality journals. Realizing how difficult it is to keep up with the pace of emerging new studies, when editing the text book ‘Marine Anthropogenic Litter’, Melanie co-founded the marine debris portal LITTERBASE. It translates published data into global maps and infographs for stakeholders. Melanie’s expertise feeds into several international expert groups on plastic pollution and informs national and European policy makers. Passionate about science communication, she has given countless interviews to the media, community talks and contributed to exhibitions including the travelling Ocean Plastic Lab.

Theme: Methodology for analyses of micro and nano particles

Jes Vollertsen is Professor of Environmental Engineering at Aalborg University, Denmark. His background is biological and chemical processes and pollutants in urban waters. His microplastics work focuses on analytical methods for quantification with the goal to contribute to trustworthy, fast, and affordable methods to quantify microplastics in the environment. His work targets all types of matrixes, e.g. water, wastewater, biota, food, soil, sediments, biosolids, air, etcetera. He addresses the processes behind mitigation technologies and attempts to quantify the load of microplastics on the natural environment. He addresses aspects of the physical, chemical, and biological breakdown of microplastics in the environment.