Professor Kathryn Riley

Professor Kathryn Riley
Department of Chemistry
Swarthmore College
Abstract

Embodying DEI in Teaching, Research, and Outreach

In this talk, I will discuss the challenges and triumphs in my journey as a black woman in chemistry. I will also share how my personal experiences have shaped my current approaches to DEI work. Specifically, I will outline how I have designed my courses for inclusivity, how I have built and sustained a diverse research team, how my research enables the participation of diverse scholars in nanomaterials research, and the work I am doing to improve K-12 education in underserved communities.

Kathryn Riley

Dr. Kathryn Riley is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Swarthmore College. She received her Ph.D. from Wake Forest University in 2014 and was a National Research Council (NRC) postdoctoral fellow at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) from 2015-2016. Before her current appointment, she was a Consortium for Faculty Diversity (CFD) postdoctoral fellow at Swarthmore from 2016-2018. Dr. Riley’s research involves the development of analytical techniques for the characterization of nanomaterials (NMs) and their dynamic physical and chemical transformations in biological and environmental matrices. Her research group specifically aims to broaden participation in the field by developing techniques that provide new quantitative insights in less time and at a reduced cost when compared to more commonly employed methods. Projects in her group span the analysis of engineered NMs (metal and metal oxide NMs, DNA nanostructures) and incidental NMs (nano and microplastics).

Hosted by Alexander Umanzor