Kayla Brignac

Aloha mai kkou! A little bit about me, I did my undergrad in environmental chemistry and graduated from the University of Hawaii at Mnoa in 2018. Upon graduation, I continued to work with the NIST Hawaii Chemical Sciences division and assisted in the establishment of the Center for Marine Debris Research. I came into the field of polymer science through plastic pollution research as I've spent the last 6 years as a spectroscopist reverse engineering marine debris collected from various environmental matrices in the Hawaiian region. I joined the Lehigh polymer science graduate program in 2020 in hopes to bridge the gap between environmental sciences/engineering and materials/polymer science. My primary research focuses on environmental degradation pathways of various polymers and recycling capabilities of plastic marine debris.