Stéphanie Reynaud is a polymer chemist. After her PhD, she began her career at the Carnegie Mellon Institute (Pittsburgh) and the Atofina company (Philadelphia), before being recruited by the French national center of research (CNRS). Her field of expertise is polymer chemistry: synthesis, characterization and study of the properties of plastic and composite materials. Since 2015, she focus on the issues raised by plastic pollution. In this context, her research projects are on the smallest debris: microplastics and more particularly nanoplastics. To date, nanoplastic sampling methods do not exist, Stéphanie Reynaud develops in the laboratory model samples whose properties are representative of environmental debris. In collaboration with her colleagues from IPREM, Bruno Grassl and Javier Jimenez-Lamana, she develops detection and quantification methods that will be used for future environmental sampling and improves the understanding of the physicochemical behavior of nanoplastics in complex environments (freshwater and sea water, soil, organisms) especially in the presence of co-pollutants. The results are used to better assess the impacts and risks of plastic pollution on the environment and living organisms.

In this thematic, her projects are multidisciplinary to address the issues of the field in their complexity, her collaborators are chemists, ecotoxicologists, biologists, physicists.

Stéphanie Reynaud is a member of the IPREM management committee, co-responsible for the scientific division «Physico-Chemistry of Surfaces and Polymer Materials» of IPREM and the analytical platform «PolyCats» which includes UPPAtech’s equipment for the analysis and characterization of polymer materials. She is a member of the Scientific Council of the French research group «Polymères & Océans». Since 2023, she has been a member of the International Scientist’s Coalition, an international group of scientists supporting a binding treaty to end plastic pollution by 2040.