Professor Katherine Owens created a new course called Marine Debris Honor course for the spring semester. This course was funded by a grant NOAA, which is the National Oceanic Atmospherics Administration. Students can take this class as a 300 level politics course or a honors seminar, and this class will teach students how much plastic has been accumulated in our water waves and how we can prevent that from ending up in our water waves in the future.

According to Professor Owens, students taking marine debris honors course will obtain first hand experience in politics by “Collecting debris and then cataloging it and then writing a policy report where we make suggestions about how communities can fix this problem. We’re going to present the results to the Connecticut legislator in the spring and we already worked with the environmental committee to get permission to take our results to them and show them sort of what this problem looks like in the state of Connecticut.”

Students of all majors can take and benefit from this course. According to Professor Owens, “We really want is to be accessible to students across the university. And I think that engineering students and business students, and students from all of the colleges would get a lot out of this.”

Students interested in taking the course who are not in the honors program and want to take marine debris honor course can visit Professor Owens’ office in Hillyer Hall room 126H.

Her phone number is 860.768.5492, and her email address is .