Speaker: Mackenzie Bowden, EVEN PhD Candidate, Mansfeldt group

Topic: Reframing Environmental Risk Assessment for Aqueous Contaminant Mixtures

Bio: Mackenzie received her B.S. in Chemical Engineering in 2018 and M.S. in Sustainable Engineering in 2022, both from Villanova University. Before joining the Environmental Engineering program at CU Boulder in 2022, she also worked as an Alteration Installation Team Manager for the Department of the Navy and completed a Fulbright Research Fellowship in Indonesia. Her doctoral research focuses on chemical mixture risk assessment in environmental systems.

Abstact: Traditional approaches to environmental risk assessment treat contaminant mixtures as static entities, failing to account for the dynamic and temporally variable nature of realistic aqueous systems. This seminar proposes a reframing of risk assessment through an iterative triangular model that better reflects the complexity of environmental exposure scenarios. Drawing on Beate Escher's foundational work in effect-based monitoring and mixture toxicology, I will illustrate this model using original case studies from two high-variability systems (wildfire-affected watersheds and municipal sanitary sewer influent) to demonstrate how conventional static frameworks fall short and how an iterative approach can more accurately characterize risk. By integrating dynamic system behavior into the assessment process, this framework offers a more responsive and ecologically realistic pathway for managing contaminant mixture risk in aqueous environments.