Checking In With Win Cowger

Young Leaders Award recipient Dr. Win Cowger is the Research Director at the Moore Institute for Plastic Pollution Research. Win is an internationally sought expert for his data analysis skills and has produced software and methodological standards that are highly utilized and cited by the plastic pollution research community. His disciplinary background is in Environmental Science where he studies the sources, transport, and fate of plastic pollution in the environment. Win’s primary objective with science is to identify solutions to plastic pollution and assess their effectiveness.

We recently checked in with Win to learn more about his background and plans for the conservation and regeneration of the planet.

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WS: Could you start by telling us a bit about yourself and what inspired you to embark on your current project?

WC: When I was 19 years old I did one of my first cleanups and was overwhelmed with joy by the experience of directly helping the environment and instantly seeing the fruit of my work by looking at a clean landscape. I found myself wondering why the trash was there, where it would go in the environment if I left it, how I could prevent it from getting there in the first place. These ideas consumed me as I continued through school and I eventually got a PhD in Environmental Science focused on trash and their degradation byproducts, microplastics. Today microplastics are a majority of my work because we are finding them everywhere, including in people. I am working to develop high throughput methods for measuring microplastics so that everyone can understand their risk and exposure to them. 

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WS: How might receiving the Walking Softer Young Leaders Award affect your project? 

WC: The Walking Softer Young Leaders Award is going to allow me to financially sustain Open Specy. One of the biggest problems has been that as Open Specy's users increase, it costs me more money to host the tool. I am working to get Open Specy reconfigured so that it can scale without costing me a ton of money to host it. Another issue is that to keep Open Specy at the cutting edge, I need to find new funding every year to pursue the advancements. I am exploring new revenue streams for the tool like providing spectroscopy and app development services that will keep me funded to continue developing the tool long-term. 

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WS: Can you describe the core components of your project and how they contribute to the conservation or regeneration of the planet?

WC: I developed Open Specy, an open-source data analysis tool, to automate my own microplastic data analysis workflows. By making it open source, other researchers around the world started using it too and now hundreds of labs are dependent on Open Specy to do their research. We can't take effective action without data to drive our decisions. Microplastic data is so challenging to analyze that it has stalled out progress on taking action to prevent microplastics. Open Specy is catalyzing the next generation of solutions by overcoming this issue. 

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WS: In what ways does your project engage with local communities? How important is community involvement to the success of your initiative and why?

WC: The Open Specy community is vibrant. I currently host monthly meetups with Open Specy community members and about 40 researchers show up. Currently, we are running through training together and in the future, I am hoping that these highly trained researchers can help me to advance the tool even further as many other researchers have already contributed to code and data on the platform. Open Science is Open Specy's bread and butter and that means making knowledge and tools available and accessible to all with as little restriction as possible. The community involvement in this tool is what is going to take spectroscopy to the next level because none of the commercial tools are using this framework and it allows you to scale extremely fast and get tons of user feedback and improvements. 

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WS: Where do you see your project in the next five years? What are your long-term goals for expanding or evolving your work?

WC: In the Next 5 years, I want Open Specy to become the default spectroscopy software for research in and beyond microplastic research. I see the spectral library being the best on the market, fully open and accessible to all. I see a vibrant community of researchers improving the tool and it growing to be used for questions beyond anything I am currently imagining. I see the largest multinational spectroscopy companies leveraging knowledge from Open Specy to make new devices and provide better services to their customers.

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Learn more about Win's work:

Open Specy Webiste

Win's Website