Spotlight: SURF Student Theresa Thomas Helps With Making a Database on the Circular Economy More Accessible

Accessibility comes in many forms, such as providing alt text or descriptive text of an image on a website, or generally making information more accessible to a larger audience. For NIST intern Theresa Thomas, she’s helping with the latter.

A recent college graduate from William & Mary, Theresa is spending her summer at NIST as part of NIST’s Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship Program, or SURF.

During her time at NIST, she’s helping with work on a registry database focused on the circular economy — an economy in which materials are designed to retain their value through repeated reuse, repair and recycling, with disposal as a last resort.

The registry is a database of resources about sustainability, circularity and recycling that will help anyone working on circular economy research. 

Theresa’s task is to help put resources that have already been identified into the database and tag them with keywords and add metadata. She also helps find bugs in the database by serving as a fresh set of eyes.

The database is still in development and in the beta phase but will be useful for not just researchers in this field but individuals outside of it such as policymakers, academics and those in the broader field of industry.

“During this development stage of the registry, I’m at a place where my input makes a difference in how people will use the registry and access these resources. I want it to be accessible to people from the public at large to subject matter experts. My goal is to make the content understandable and the search engine easier so people can find the research they’re specifically looking for.”