Nur Azeyanti

Nur Azeyanti is a second-year PhD student in Environmental Biology who is interested in the effects of marine plastic pollution on benthic marine invertebrates. She is currently investigating a very small scale of plastics known as microplastics, with a particular emphasis on submicron-sized plastics and their effect on marine benthic organisms in the Firth of Clyde, Scotland, where her fieldwork is currently taking place. She hopes to map the distribution of microplastics on the seafloor to better understand how they enter the ocean and are then ingested by marine invertebrates. These plastic polymers are a direct threat to marine organisms and also have a negative effect on the ecosystem indirectly through the adsorption of other marine pollutants. This is a critical area of study because understanding the effect of microplastics on the physiology of the organism is critical for determining the extent to which they can be detrimental to the biota that directly affects the marine environment.

She is currently engaged in a number of individual and collaborative microplastics projects with institutions such as the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the Microplastic Research Interest Group of the Universiti Malaysia Terengganu.