Sheri Bastien is an Associate Professor of Public Health at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences in Norway and an adjunct faculty member at the Cumming School of Medicine, University of Calgary, Canada. She has been engaged in transdisciplinary research for over a decade in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia on a range of issues related to determinants of adolescent health and global health promotion, with a focus on sexual and reproductive health and HIV prevention, as well as water, sanitation and hygiene and most recently dengue prevention and control. As a post doc she developed an intervention called Project SHINE (Sanitation and Hygiene INnovation in Education) which has been successfully implemented and evaluated in rural Tanzania and India.
Through her participation in Leg 5 of eXXpedition, she hopes that being surrounded by an inspiring, passionate group of women on board will provide the first-hand experience needed to help develop an in-depth understanding of the issue of plastics pollution, innovative approaches to raise awareness and find alternative solutions, and to establish the network to help grow the SHINE model of science education and social entrepreneurship to include the issue of plastics which affects youth and communities globally.
