Viansa Reid

Elevator Pitch Transcript:

Hi everyone. My name is Viansa Reid. I'm an IGP level five student, and I'm here to present my elevator pitch. The name of the or the title of my work, is Global Analysis of Plastic Persistence, Dual Study of Biodegradation and Extraction of Microplastics in the Soil.

I studied abroad in Alicante, Spain the last year, a beach town. It was very beautiful. I had an incredible experience getting to know a different culture and really immersing myself in the language and it was so awesome to live near the beach, I had never done that before, so I was very excited and very grateful for the experience.

I studied at the Universidad de Alicante, in a small town a little bit north of Alicante. I ended up living in the center, but it was only a 25-minute bus ride if I needed to go up there, so it was very manageable. My majors are Environmental Science and Spanish. When at the university, I took a botany class, as well as a Spanish and European geography class during my first semester abroad.

As for my fieldwork, I worked in the bioplastic lab at the University of Alicante, and I worked with three different projects. There were some master's students, so one of them, as you can see in the bottom right, we were digging up some dirt. She needed dirt to be able to grow different types of plants, and we put microplastics in there to see how the plants absorbed them. You see another giant picture of all the different buckets of how much soil we extracted for that project.

Another project we worked with was receiving a whole bunch of soils from all over the world, and extracting the microplastics from those samples, doing a chemical process to do that. And then the third project I worked in was called Plastifun. We took grocery bags locally from a whole bunch of different grocery stores, cut them up. You can see here, there's a ruler and some scissors. We cut those up into small pieces. In the top left corner, you can see the little bag. We would sew the bags closed with this little mesh. And then if you see the thread, it's different colors. There's black and orange, one of the colors symbolized which grocery stores they came from, and the other one was determining where it would be placed in the soil. So we created all of these samples to send all over the world to different universities for them to plant in their soil for about 21 days. And then afterwards, they'd dig it up, and they would weigh the leftover plastic, and we would see which soils around the world were best for biodegrading the plastics.

And during the completion of this project, I was fully immersed in Spanish speaking every day, I got a lot better in my proficiency, and actually tested into the fluency part. So I am fully fluent in Spanish for the speaking, which was a really incredible achievement.

If my elevator pitch interests you and you want to see me at the summit, come find me and my poster. I hope to see you there.