Kathryn Youngblood

With more than a decade of experience studying upstream solutions to plastic pollution, Kathryn Youngblood is a Senior Research Engineer at the Jambeck Circularity Informatics Lab at the University of Georgia College of Engineering. Kathryn’s work focuses on data collection and analysis to prevent plastic pollution at the community level. Her specialties include geospatial data analysis and modeling, engaging community stakeholders through qualitative research, and science communication. Kathryn is a key member of the core team that developed and scaled the Circularity Assessment Protocol (CAP), a holistic baselining tool that provides actionable data on circularity at the community level. CAP has now been conducted in 56 cities in 16 countries around the world, Kathryn has personally managed projects, conducted fieldwork, trained local partners, led data analysis, and synthesized recommendations for communities in diverse geographies like Seychelles, India, Chile, Mexico, United States, Maldives, and Aruba, among others, in collaboration with federal agencies and international non-profits like USAID, the US EPA Trash Free Waters Program, the Ocean Conservancy, and National Geographic. Kathryn also directs Marine Debris Tracker, a community science app used to log open data on plastic pollution that has been used to record more than 9 million debris items in over 90 countries around the world.