IMSA-SIR Modeling the Environmental Fate of plastics

Internship Description

Background:

To minimize the potential harms associated with plastic waste leaking into the environment, there has been a push to develop new materials with more benign and less harmful properties. As part of this effort, we are developing computer models to quantify and predict the environmental fate and effects of plastic materials. These models leverage computational chemistry techniques like machine learning and quantum chemistry to discover the complex relationships between microscopic structure and macroscopic effects.

Description of Student Internship:

Computational chemistry techniques will be used to model the environmental properties of polymers and plastics with a specific focus on mobility, bioaccumulation, persistence and toxicity. This work will include data collection and curation, as well as model development and tuning.

Education and Experience Requirements

Required Skills:

Skills include a basic knowledge of chemistry, interest in learning basic computing environments like R, python, and unix, and an interest to learn and apply more advanced concepts of modeling and environmental chemistry.

Internship Family

Internship Category