Dr. Marielis C Zambrano

Marielis Zambrano holds a Ph.D. degree from the Department of Forest Biomaterials through the College of Natural Resources at North Carolina State University (NC State). She received her B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University Los Andes in Venezuela in 2014. Marielis has experience managing multidisciplinary teams in international organizations in industry and academia. The sustainability has been the center of her career and during her Ph.D. at NC State, she has worked with an environmental hot topic -- the plastic contamination in aquatic environments, specifically, understanding the generation of microplastics or microfibers shed during the laundering of textiles and their fate in aquatic and marine environments. She did groundbreaking work on the impact of microfibers on the bacterial communities in natural settings such as lake and ocean waters, and currently, she is evaluating the effects of textile finishes on cellulose-based fibers on their environmental fate. Marielis is passionate about promoting the circular economy in our society to create a sustainable future.