Particle resuspension due to shoaling internal solitary waves is studied through laboratory experiments and direct numerical simulations. Experiments examined particles placed along the sloping bottom to observe when and where bedload transport and particle resuspension occurred. Through comparison of velocimetry measurements between the experiments and the simulations, the accuracy of the numerical results was established. A suite of simulations were conducted to investigate the dependence of the location of particle resuspension on bottom slope and incident wave parameters. While a rapid increase in the Shields parameter in the lee of the shoaling wave corresponds with the observed location of resuspension, we find that particle transport away from the bottom is better assessed by the resuspension criterion w_L=w_s > 1, where w_s is the particle settling velocity and the vertical Lagrangian velocity, w_L = w- su, in which vec(u) = (u,w) is the Eulerian velocity and s is the slope, measures the rise of fluid from the bottom following a streamline.