演  講  公  告

講員：鄭明正教授

時間：7/18，15：00-16：00

地點：E1-306

Microplastic Monitoring and Management:

Finding the Needle in the Haystack

Mark Ming-Cheng Cheng, Ph.D Professor,

Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering,

The University of Alabama

Abstract

Microplastic, including microbeads, fragments and fibers are plastic smaller than 5 mm in size. Microplastic in both marine and freshwater systems has become an emerging environmental issue. An estimated 33 billion pounds of the world's plastic trash enters the oceans every year, according to the nonprofit conservation group Oceana Currently, the information of microplastic is collected based on field sampling by labor and analyzed in the laboratories. According to the guideline published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the process typically involves filtration, drying, chemical treatment, isolation, and visual inspection of microplastics to characterize their size and appearance. The data provides limited microplastic information in terms of chemical compositions with a lack of spatial and temporal resolutions.  In this talk, I will discuss the recent progress in the development of rapid and cost-effective quantitative analysis platforms comprised of internet-of-things (IoT) sensors. Microfluidic also plays a critical role in the separation and sample preparation prior to analysis.

Bio: Dr. Cheng received his BS and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering from National Tsing-Hua University, Taiwan in 1995, 2003 respectively. He joined the University of Alabama (UA) as a full professor in 2019. Prior to that, he was a faculty member at Wayne State University and the University of Texas Health Science at Houston. Dr. Cheng’s research interests include sensor design, internet-of-things (IoT), biomedical devices, microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), and 2D materials. Cheng received the NSF CAREER Award, ONR Summer Research Faculty Award and Presidential Research Enhancement Award. At UA, he and his students are applying state-of-the-art technologies to emerging challenges in our society, including water population and wearable biomedical sensing. His current research is supported by the National Science Foundation, the Great Lake Protection Fund, the United States Geological Survey (USGS), and NOAA.