Congrats to our SIBECOL member Cristina Romera Castillo for receiving the ASLO Raymond L. Lindeman Award! She is the second Spanish recipient of this award (after last year's awardee A.G. Bravo, also a SIBECOL member!), which each year honors a young scientist for an outstanding paper in aquatic sciences. The awarded study, published last year in Nature Communications, is entitled “Dissolved organic carbon leaching from plastics stimulates microbial activity in the ocean”, and derives from her work at Vienna University (Austria) on the biogeochemistry of carbon in marine ecosystems. Dr. Romera-Castillo and collaborators demonstrate for the first time that the large amounts of plastic that we deliver to the oceans can leach dissolved organic carbon that is ultimately used by marine microorganisms such as bacteria. In addition, the study shows that the release of carbon by plastic fragments is altered by sunlight exposure in the ocean.
 
Dr. Cristina Romera-Castillo is currently a researcher at the Institute of Marine Sciences (ICM-CSIC) in Barcelona, where she is leading her own research project of the interaction between plastic and marine microbes. 
 
Congratulations again, Cristina!!
 
 
More information about this year’s individual awardees is available at https://www.aslo.org/aslo-awards/2020-aslo-award-recipients/