Riley Mulhern

  • Assistant Professor
  • ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES
Riley Mulhern

Water quality • Risk assessment • Data science • Environmental justice

My research investigates environmental contamination and human health-related exposures.

My approach centers on community engagement and data-intensive research. In the past, I have worked with communities in North Carolina, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and the Bolivian Andes. I will be developing research collaborations with others at INSTAAR, CU Boulder, and beyond.

See also:

Education

  • PhD (Environmental Sciences and Engineering): University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2021
  • MS (Environmental Engineering): University of Colorado Boulder, 2016
  • BS (Physics: Geophysics and International Development): Wheaton College, 2014

Note to prospective students

If you are interested in working with me beginning in the 2025-2026 school year, please send me an email describing your research interests and goals and how they align with my work.

Selected publications

MacDonald Gibson, J., Desclos, A., Harrington, J., McElmurry, S.P., Mulhern, R., 2024: Effect of community water service on lead in drinking water in an environmental justice community. Environmental Science & Technology 58 (3), 1441-1451. doi 10.1021/acs.est.3c01341

Mulhern, R.E., Kondash, AJ, Norman, E., Johnson, J., Levine, K., McWilliams, A., Napier, M.,  Weber, F., Stella, L., Wood, E., Lee Pow Jackson, C., Colley, S., Cajka, J., MacDonald Gibson, J., Hoponick Redmon, J. 2023: Improved decision making for water lead testing in US child care facilities using machine-learned Bayesian networks. Environmental Science & Technology 57 (46), 17959-17970. doi 10.1021/acs.est.2c07477

Mulhern, R., Roostaei, J., Schwetschenau, S., Pruthi, T., Campbell, C., MacDonald Gibson, J. 2022: A new approach to a legacy concern: evaluating machine-learned Bayesian networks to predict childhood lead exposure risk from community water systems. Environmental Research 204, 112146. doi 10.1016/j.envres.2021.112146

Mulhern, R., Grubbs, B., Gray, K., MacDonald Gibson, J. 2022: User experience of point-of-use water treatment for private wells in North Carolina: Implications for outreach and well stewardship. Science of the Total Environment 806, 150448. doi 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2021.150448

For more publications, see Mulhern's Google Scholar profile.