Profile: Bridging the Gap Between Chemical Engineering and Social Justice

If you grew up in the U.S. East Coast or Midwest regions, you may remember the childhood thrill of finding out school was cancelled due to a snow day. However, for Donna Riley — Dean of the School of Engineering at the Univ. of New Mexico (UNM) — a native of Pasadena, CA, it wasn’t blizzards that made her stay home as a student, but rather smog.

Before the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was established and the Clean Air Act was passed in 1970, unregulated vehicle emissions and a rapidly growing population caused Los Angeles (L.A.) and its surrounding areas to be cloaked in a thick haze. Many residents accepted this as the norm, but Riley was unwilling to take this as an unsolvable problem. “The environmental bads are not distributed equally in L.A.,” says Riley. She began to notice that working-class people were more affected by air pollution, their neighborhoods situated more closely to landfills and industrial sites.

Riley recalls taking road trips with her family to explore other parts of California. She remembers noticing the stark contrast between the air quality and natural beauty of other regions of the state and L.A., inspiring a passion for environmental and social justice early on. This passion would drive Riley’s future career as an educator and advocate for underrepresented groups in chemical engineering.

When deciding what to study in college, Riley was at a crossroads. She wanted to combine her interests in policy, the environment, and public health, but the fields of environmental engineering and science were only beginning to emerge. Her father, who was the first in his family to attend college, studied chemical engineering before dedicating his career to the oil and gas sector. He proposed that Riley study engineering due to its versatility for solving a range of problems.

Based on his suggestion, Riley chose to study at Princeton Univ. and received a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering with a certificate in environmental studies. However, she found that much of the material in her classes lacked significant coverage of environmental applications. It wasn’t until she completed a research project on heavy metal contamination that she gained insight into how chemical engineering principles can solve environmental problems.

Working on a project with an impact that Riley was passionate about, combined with her newfound appreciation for research, led her to pursue a PhD in Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon Univ. In this interdisciplinary graduate program, she worked on multiple projects, one of which consisted of indoor air quality monitoring for consumer products such as paint strippers and methylene chloride. This project combined her interests in social policy and environmental modeling, but it also relied upon her knowledge of chemical engineering, as indoor air quality is modeled similarly to continuous stirred tank reactors (CSTRs).

After earning her PhD, Riley completed two postdoctoral fellowships: one at Princeton, where she studied mercury as an indoor air quality pollutant, and one as an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Science & Technology Policy Fellow in the EPA’s Superfund program.

Despite focusing much of her education on environmental justice, Riley still felt that her activism work and engineering work were on two parallel tracks. In college, she had spent significant time organizing around gender disparities, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) rights, and other social justice issues. It wasn’t until her first teaching job that she began to merge these interests with engineering. Riley was hired as one of the founding faculty members of Smith College’s engineering program — the first of its kind at a U.S. women’s college. As the only chemical engineer on staff, she taught thermodynamics. In contrast to her own education, though, she wanted her course to be discussion-based.

“[My professors] had these crisp old notes that were all yellow. They would write what was in their notes on the blackboard; we would write what was on the blackboard in our notes, and then figure it all out later. That was the pedagogy.” Although she had learned some teaching techniques in grad school, she was still figuring out what worked best.

Furthermore, she began noticing certain divides in how close students chose to sit to the front of the lecture hall; these distributions often correlated with race and socio-economic status. Motivated to understand why this was and change it, she applied for and won a National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award. Through the support of this grant, she researched and implemented educational practices for engaging under-represented demographic groups in engineering disciplines.

Now, as the Dean of the UNM School of Engineering, Riley is inspired to continue building a positive culture where students feel encouraged and engaged, and faculty and staff feel supported. “What motivates [our faculty and staff] to be here is the transformative power of education to change lives,” she emphasizes. “Whether it’s the education we do or the research we do, that work is transformative to our state and the people in the state.”

Just as her father did, Riley values the idea that anyone should be able to attend college, get a degree, and better their life. As Dean, she strives to prioritize student success to give as many people as possible access to a quality education. “The world needs more engineers. Let’s make them.”