Donna M. Riley

Associate Professor
Picker Engineering Program
Smith College
51 College Lane
Northampton, MA 01063
413-585-7003 (o)
413-585-7001 (f)
driley@smith.edu

Bio
Teaching
Scholarship

Bio

Donna Riley is Associate Professor and founding faculty member in the Picker Engineering Program at Smith College, the first engineering program at a U.S. women's college, and one of only a handful at liberal arts colleges.

Riley received her Ph.D. in Engineering and Public Policy from Carnegie Mellon University in 1998 and her B.S.E. in Chemical Engineering from Princeton University. Her dissertation work focused on consumer product safety, risk perception and communication, and indoor air quality modeling.

Before coming to Smith, Riley was a AAAS Fellow at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, in the Community Involvement and Outreach Center of the Superfund Office.

Donna Riley was the Clayton Postdoctoral Fellow in Industrial Ecology at the Princeton Environmental Institute at Princeton University . She worked with the Industrial Ecology Research Group on the ecological impacts of land use in New Jersey, on the industrial ecology of mercury, and on information technology's use to improve the efficiency of second-hand markets.

For more information, please refer to my c.v. .

Folk and Spiritual Uses of Mercury - Riley, in collaboration with Alison Newby, an anthropologist at NMSU, considers uses of elemental mercury as part of folk and spiritual traditions in Latino and Caribbean communities in the United States. This work includes modeling indoor air quality after use and accidental spills, estimating the fate and transport of mercury in media typical of uses in Latino and Caribbean communities, and conducting experiments to validate these models.

Human Factors in Exposure Analysis for household chemical products - how do people interact with products in their home? What influences their decision-making regarding product use and protective measures? How do we achieve accurate estimates of human exposure that correctly account for human behavior? How can product labels and other communication materials be designed to promote better-informed decisions among product users?

Engineering Education

Liberative Pedagogies in Engineering Education - Pedagogies of liberation, including feminist and critical pedagogies based on the works of bell hooks, Paulo Freire and others, are employed in teaching engineering courses at Smith College. Aspects of implementation include connecting course material to student experience, emphasizing students as authorities in the classroom, integrating ethics and policy considerations, problematizing science as objectivity, and de-centering western (and male) civilization. The project includes assessment of the effectiveness of these pedagogies for fostering learning, and for addressing the needs of all students while increasing the accessibility of attractiveness of engineering for underrepresented groups.

Engineering and Social Justice -

Publications available online:

Assessing Elemental Mercury Vapor Exposure from Cultural and Religious Practices

To Move People from Apathy: A Multi-Perspective Approach To Ethics Across The Engineering Curriculum (PDF) - with Glenn Ellis and Susannah Howe

Pedagogies of Liberation in an Engineering Thermodynamics Class (PDF)

Previous work with L. Jean Camp on Gender and Online Speech

Bedrooms, Barrooms, and Boardrooms On the Internet, Selected Papers from the 1996 Telecommunications Policy Research Conference, eds. G. L. Rosston & D. Waterman; Lawrence Earlbaum Associates (NY, NY) Summer 1997. A previous version presented at Virtue & Virtuality: A Conference on Gender, Law and Cyberspace, MIT Cambridge, MA, 19-20 April 1996. Demonstrates the inappropiateness of applying traditional media types to the Internet and proposes a new paradigm of spaces that enables institutions to simultaneously provide open forums and safe spaces.
Women, Children, Animals, and the Like: Protecting an Unwilling Electronic Populace, Proceedings of the Fifth Conference of Computers Freedom and Privacy, 28-31 March 1995, San Francisco, CA, pp. 120-139. A policy analysis of Carnegie Mellon University's policy that censored sexual information online.