Ryan G. Mullen, PhD, is a teaching assistant professor in the Dept. of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering at the Univ. of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Mullen joined the faculty at Illinois in 2022. Drawing on his strong background in mathematics and data science, he teaches undergraduate courses in process design and computational tools, and leads the new ChemE+DS program. Before entering academia, Mullen worked as a staff scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and as a reservoir engineer at ExxonMobil — real-world experience that he now integrates into coursework. Mullen also conducted postdoctoral research at Univ. of Notre Dame, where he developed molecular simulation techniques for ionic liquids. Mullen is a member of AIChE and the American Society for Engineering Education. He earned his BS at Brigham Young Univ. and PhD from the Univ. of California, Santa Barbara, both in chemical engineering.