URIs_MOMENTUM_Research_and_Innovation_Magazine_Spring_2026_M

THE RIPPLE EFFECT OF RESEARCH FUNDING

FOR BETTER OUTCOMES

By Shaun Kirby ‘07

Daniel Roxbury is used to developing sensors that help us explain complex environments, such as cancer cells in the body or chemical pollutants in seawater. Studying microplastics, however, presents a whole new challenge, one new initiative funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) aims to overcome. “It’s been really eye-opening to see how much we don’t know about microplastics,” says the associate professor of chemical, biomolecular, and materials engineering at the University of Rhode Island. Roxbury is the principal investigator of SIMCoast (Socio-ecological Impact of Microplastics in Coastal Ecosystems), a $7 million, four-year grant building Rhode Island’s research capabilities to measure and study the impacts of nano- and microplastics (NMPs) throughout the Narragansett Bay watershed, an area spanning approximately 1,700 miles in Rhode Island and Massachusetts and home to nearly two million people. Scientists consider any fragment no greater than 5mm in size as a microplastic, while nanoplastics are less than 1 micron, similar in size to a speck of dust. As plastic materials like water bottles and fishing gear enter the state’s rivers and coastlines, they break down into what’s called secondary plastics . They then move through water bodies in unknown ways and with varying shapes like microfibers, films and jagged particles. SIMCoast, a grant awarded through NSF’s Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR), is trying to better understand how, and to where, microplastics are moving throughout the watershed. “There’s all different kinds of sizes and compositions of NMPs,” Roxbury says. “It’s a monumental technical challenge to be able to detect these plastics.” The project is split into three research themes with faculty from institutions across the state. One group is developing new methods for sampling microplastics in diverse water environments, including from the sediments of Narragansett Bay, areas of outwash from rivers, freshwater lakes and stormwater basins.

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