Dessì Claudia

Curriculum vitae

Claudia graduated in Natural Sciences in 2016 at the University of Cagliari. During her bachelor’s studies she was involved in different mobility programs, in CEMDA (Mexican Centre for Environmental Law, Mexico City) and UAM (Metropolitan Autonomous University), focused on the loss of human rights of indigenous people, as a result of the depletion of their dwelling  environments (e.g. due to mining, fracking, aqueducts); and the ecological role and ethnobotanical interest of different flora groups. In addition, she joined the Erasmus Studio project, with whom she studied for eleven months in La Laguna University (Spain) and took a short internship on cetaceans’ vocal clans in BIOECOMAC lab.

Claudia obtained her master’s degree with the highest honours in Marine Bio-ecology in 2019, in the University of Cagliari, with an experimental thesis “Microplastics on the digestive tract of a crustacean of commercial interest: the Norwegian lobster Nephrops norvegicus (Linnaeus, 1758)”.

Her thesis received the first place of “Premio di Laurea Majorca 2020”, a National Degree Award dedicated to marine ecosystem dedicated thesis.

In 2019, after the master’s degree she spent three months on the Marine Ecology Lab at University of Bremen (Germany) as a part of Erasmus+ Traineeship program, whereby was involved in laboratory experiments focused on physiological and molecular responses to environmental stressors on Octocorals.  In the same year, she also joined the research group of Queensland Alliance for Environmental Health Sciences (University of Queensland, Australia) with whom learn more in deep about the different methodologies on quantification of micro- and nanoplastics in different environmental and food matrices.

Since February, until September 2020, she had a scholarship in the University of Cagliari, about the investigation, quantification and development of coordinated protocols and infrastructures to support a new fishing for litter project (in the framework of the Fishing Litter and Abandoned Gears in Sardinia (FLAGS) project).

She is currently a PhD student in the PhD Program in Life, Environmental and Drug Sciences, under the supervision of Prof. Maria Cristina Follesa and Dr. Alessandro Cau, with a project focused on the investigation of plastic pollution in deep-sea environment, including their dwelling fauna,  the consequently physiological and ecological effects on them, and the trap and sink mechanism interactions among microplastics and different environmental carriers.

Publications

Claudia Dessì, Elvis D. Okoffo, Jake W. O’Brien, Michael Gallen, Saer Samanipour, Sarit Kaserzon, Cassandra Rauert, Xianyu Wang, Kevin V. Thomas, 2021. Plastics contamination of store-bought rice. Journal of Hazardous Materials 416, 125778. (doi: 10.1016/j.jhazmat.2021.125778)

Alessandro Cau, Carlo Giacomo Avio, Claudia Dessì, Davide Moccia, Antonio Pusceddu, Francesco Regoli, Maria Cristina Follesa, 2020. Particle fragmentation by benthic crustacean digestion can modulate environmental fate of microplastics in the deep sea. Environmental Science & Technology 54, 4886 – 4892. (doi: 10.1021/acs.est.9b07705)

Alessandro Cau, Carlo Giacomo Avio, Claudia Dessì, Maria Cristina Follesa, Francesco Regoli & Antonio Pusceddu, 2019. Microplastics in the crustaceans Nephrops norvegicus and Aristeus antennatus: Flagship species for deep-sea environments? Environmental Pollution 255, 113107. (doi: 10.1016/j.envpol.2019.113107)

 

Claudia Dessì, Cinzia Podda, Lucia Pittura, Alessandro Cau. Preliminary data on European eel skin mucus as trapper of microplastics in riverine ecosystems. Meeting of doctoral students and young researchers in Ecology and Sciences of Aquatic Systems, Italian Society of Oceanography and Limnology (AIOL) and Italian Society of Ecology (SItE), Online 2021.

Claudia Dessì, Elvis D. Okoffo, Jake W. O’Brien and Kevin V. Thomas. Trying to improve the quantification of plastic intake in wildlife and human food. School of Pharmacy-QAEHS 1st Annual Student Research Symposium (The University of Queensland), Brisbane, Australia, 2019.

Alessandro Cau, Carlo Giacomo Avio, Francesco Regoli, Claudia Dessì, Antonio Pusceddu, Maria Cristina Follesa. Microplastic  ingestion  in  the  gourmet  crustacean  Aristeus antennatus (Risso, 1816) in Sardinian sea. XXIV AIOL Congress (Italian Society of Oceanography and Limnology), Bologna (Italy) 2019

Alessandro Cau, Carlo Giacomo Avio, Francesco Regoli, Claudia Dessì, Maria Cristina Follesa, Davide Moccia, Antonio Pusceddu. Gourmet food in the Plastic Era: Microplastic ingestion in Nephrops norvegicus and Aristeus antennatus. XXVIII SItE congress (Italian Society of Ecology), Cagliari (Italy) 2018