Associate ProfessorAlessandra Sutti

Alessandra is Associate Professor at the Institute for Frontier Materials, Deakin University, where she leads a team focused in polymer and textiles research. Her mission is to bring greater “circularity” in the world of materials manufacturing, textiles in particular.

Alessandra graduated from the University of Parma (Italy) and obtained her PhD in materials science from the same in 2007. Moving from Italy to Australia in 2006, she has since been pursuing a career in materials engineering and manufacturing. Alessandra leads a multidisciplinary team of young researchers. Their work at Deakin University has resulted in a number of technological innovations, including materials manufacturing processes, novel chemical treatments to improve the performance of textiles and new textiles testing techniques, through close collaboration with Industry partners.

Alessandra is interested in catalysing transformative societal change towards a circular economy also through environmental education. She has been collaborating with The GLOBE Program, a US Program run by NASA, with a focus on introducing microplastics monitoring approaches in global education. Alessandra and collaborators have reached over 10,000 students and 50 teachers in over 20 countries, all trained to monitor microplastics in surface waters and produce data and images for a huge and growing open reference library of microplastics images.