Outi Keinänen

Microplastics are everywhere—human bodies included. But it’s unclear what health effects these particles might have on organs and tissues, not least because researchers have struggled to track the plastics as they move through living organisms. Outi Keinänen aims to fill that knowledge gap. Her research lab at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) is using radiochemical methods to understand the fate of microplastics in mammals. These studies in living creatures are important “because any toxicological evaluation begins with determining the biodistribution—determining where the contaminants go,” Keinänen says. It’s an idea she first developed as a postdoctoral researcher at Hunter College after reading a paper from a group that was using fluorophore imaging to try to accomplish the same thing. Fluorophores are fluorescent chemical compounds that can be attached to molecules or tiny particles, which enables scientists to follow their movements with a microscope or spectrometer. But the fluorescence signal