Miss Vinuri Silva

Vinuri completed her honours at the University of Adelaide in 2019 which focused on microplastics in fish of Australia and Sri Lanka. During her honours year, her passion for marine plastic research grew further. Therefore, she decided to continue contributing to the field of oceanic plastic research through her PhD. 

Marine microbes have a key role to our planet's environmental dynamics by controlling the biogeochemistry and productivity of our oceans. Scientists have predicted that plastic in the oceans will outweigh fish by the year 2050. Vinuri's PhD focuses on identifying the types of microbes capable of adapting and colonizing marine plastic, with the use of high throughput sequencing. Due to their uniqueness, the microbial diversity living on marine plastic is now referred to as the “Plastisphere”. She also plans to integrate ocean warming conditions to investigate the types of microbes that will thrive during sea warming combined with plastic pollution in our future oceans.