Mary Coughlin is an Associate Professor in Museum Studies at The George Washington University in Washington, DC where she has taught preventive conservation in- person and online since 2006. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in Historic Preservation from Mary Washington College and her Masters of Science from the Winterthur / University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation. Before teaching full time, Mary worked for five years in the Objects Conservation Laboratory at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History where she conserved objects as diverse as FDR’s leg braces and Star War’s C-3PO and R2-D2. She has an interest in the challenges of caring for plastics in collections.