INSTAAR welcomes a new faculty fellow: Riley Mulhern
Riley Mulhern will join INSTAAR as a faculty fellow in January, concurrent with his role as an assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Studies. At INSTAAR, Mulhern will continue his work to investigate environmental contamination and human health-related exposures through a community-engaged approach.
“Mulhern’s past experiences and plans to study water quality in high elevation regions, his innovative use of artificial intelligence techniques to analyze complex observational data, and his connections to the public health sector complement and expand INSTAAR’s interdisciplinarity,” INSTAAR director Nicole Lovenduski wrote. “We are excited to welcome him to our institute!”
Previously, Mulhern was the engineering and data science lead on, a program that tested and remediated lead-contaminated water at child care and educational facilities in Georgia and North Carolina. He has also worked on projects addressing private well water quality, low-income housing and PFAS contamination. His environmental engineering and environmental justice efforts have taken him to Nicaragua, Guatemala, and the Bolivian Andes.
Mulhern earned an MS in Environmental Engineering from CU Boulder in 2016 and a PhD in Environmental Sciences & Engineering from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2021. He comes to the institute with a lengthy record of peer-reviewed publications. He received both the Highly Cited and Highly Published Author awards from RTI international in 2021.
Throughout his career, Mulhern has fostered collaboration to expand the bounds of his research and its impacts. At CU, he hopes to develop collaborative projects both within the institute and beyond.
