Ursinus Microplastics Research Featured at Biology Conference in Atlanta

Assistant Professor of Biology Colleen Bove, Ph.D., and Emily Lybashev ’25 recently traveled south to attend The Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) conference in Atlanta. The pair presented their ongoing research on microplastics in the Schuylkill River Watershed and the resulting impact on human and ecological health. It’s a project they started during last year’s Summer Fellows program.

Bove had previously attended SICB, which encapsulates a broad range of biological and ecological topics. This was Lybashev’s first time at an academic conference.

Always well-attended, the conference is also extremely student-friendly, said Bove, which is why she felt it would be a great experience for Lybashev.

“It jumps between the east coast and west coast each year, so you get representation from across the country. You even have people coming from international locations,” she said. “Students can present their research in a variety of platforms, and they get really good feedback and interactions with other scientists, whether they are other students or other faculty members or from other areas of scientific work.”

For Lybashev, the conference was a great way to network, and she even got ideas from other students which have improved her experiment since returning to campus.

“It was so fast-paced and there were so many talks I attended, so many people to talk to and interact with, I actually had to take back some things I wanted to do,” she explained. “It [wasn’t an] overwhelming experience, but it was [full of] emotions, a lot of opportunities, and it was really amazing.”

“I don’t know if I would have been able to make the trip [on my own] because I am a college student, so it’s not something that is easy to do,” Lybashev continued. “But because of [the funding we received from Ursinus] I had such an amazing time. I’m so grateful I was able to spend a week interacting with different students, seeing different people’s work and just getting a different point of view on research.”

Bove says from a teaching perspective, conferences like SICB provide opportunities for collaboration and learning which pay off in the classroom.

“I’ve identified a lot of people who can provide suggestions and resources [I can incorporate] into my own teaching, and ways to encourage students to interact more with publicly available data or other data sets,” she said. “I’m [always] really excited to see the way people are integrating their research into their teaching and through their summer research students in a way that is really marketable to the wider scientific community.”

Now back on campus, Bove and Lybashev are only continuing to improve upon their microplastics research this semester.

“It’s something that we’re going to continue, because microplastics can vary day by day, hour by hour, so it’s the kind of thing [where] we can walk down [to the Perkiomen Creek] really easily,” explained Bove. “So why not keep an eye on things and then also apply that ecology, biology side of things moving forward?”