Laura Fantuzzi

I am a PhD student at the University of Portsmouth. My background is in marine biology, which I studied at the University in Southampton, graduating with an integrated master's degree in 2022. My undergraduate research focused on the factors that drive ingestion of microplastics by marine organisms. I am interested in the fate and impacts of various water-borne pollutants and holistic approaches to achieving sustainability. I am lucky to be able to explore these interests through my PhD work at the University of Portsmouth, conducting research at the intersection of marine pollution, biodiversity and citizen science as part of the GB Row Project. In partnership with GB Row Challenge, annual sampling around the coast of Britain for microplastics, environmental DNA and underwater sounds will shed light on the distribution and spatiotemporal variability of pollution as well as their relationship with biodiversity at the ecosystem level, which I hope to be useful as a case study to scale up marine monitoring as well as for informing policy and environmental coastal management.