Dr. Jennifer Brandon

Applied Ocean Sciences

Dr. Jennifer Brandon received her PhD in Biological Oceanography at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in 2017, focusing on the nascent field of marine microplastics. She is an expert in quantifying and identifying marine microplastics, and has developed multiple novel methods to identify the smallest sizes of microplastics and determine the age of plastics exposed to varying weathering conditions in the environment. She was the first to find temporal trends of microplastic in the sediment record, and the exponential increase of microplastics she recorded from 1945-2009 closely correlates with the exponential increase in worldwide plastics production over that same time period. She also has extensive knowledge in marine ecology, having spent much of her PhD doing lab and fieldwork on the California Current ecosystem, plankton ecology, and how microplastics affect the bottom of our food web in that region.

Dr. Brandon is highly accomplished in the world of science communication, having given hundreds of interviews and lectures to all types of stakeholders, and recently completed her tenure as the Price Postdoctoral Fellow in science communication at Birch Aquarium at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, where, among other duties, she taught graduate and undergraduate courses on communicating science to the public. She has been interviewed by the BBC, NPR, the Guardian, and the LA Times, among others.