The Raymond L. Lindeman Award honors a young author for an outstanding peer-reviewed, English-language paper in the aquatic sciences. The 2020 Lindeman Award is being presented to Cristina Romera-Castillo at the Ocean Sciences Meeting 2020 at San Diego for the paper, “Dissolved organic carbon leaching from plastics stimulates microbial activity in the ocean” published by Romera-Castillo, C., M Pinto, T.M. Langer, X.A. Alvarez-Salgado, G.J. Herndl, in Nature Communications, 9: 1430; doi: 10.1038/s41467-018-03798-5, which demonstrated the mechanism through which the presence of plastics can alter the basic biogeochemical functioning of the oceans. This work has been performed in our lab during her stay as a PostDoc.