Researcher Spotlight: Gunaalan Kuddithamby
As part of the RESPONSE project, Universidade de Vigo have had the pleasure of hosting PhD researcher Gunaalan Kuddithamby for the months of July and August. Gunaalan undertook field sampling activities involving microplastic collection using the manta trawl / net and ultrafiltration in the Ría de Vigo, and the Cíes Islands that belong to "The Spanish National Park of Atlantic Islands of Galicia."
Gunaalan further contributed to work in WP4 - Bioassays in the Ecological Risk of Microplastics & Nanoplastics through the analysis of said field-collected samples at ECIMAT’s on-site laboratories. As part of this analysis, leachates from the field-collected plastics were produced and chemically characterized, before being tested by applying the sea urchin (ie., Paracentrotus lividus) bioassay and performing these measurements at different exposure time periods.
The sea urchin bioassay was previously developed by ECIMAT, Universidade de Vigo (see Beiras et al., 2019) and Gunaalan had the opportunity to participate in the application of this method first-hand.
