Dr. Mulligan specializes in environmental engineering. She has B.Eng. and M. Eng. degrees from the Department of Chemical Engineering, McGill University, Montréal (Québec) and a Ph.D., from the Department of Civil Engineering, at McGill University. After working at McGill and in industry for 16 years, she joined the Department of Building, Civil and Environmental Engineering at Concordia University as an Assistant Professor in 1999, and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2002. She was awarded the Concordia Research Chair in Environmental Engineering in 2002 and has won the Petro-Canada Young Innovator Award twice (2002-2003 and 2004-2005).
Catherine Mulligan has B.Eng. and M.Eng. degrees in chemical engineering from McGill University, and a Ph.D. specializing in geoenvironmental engineering, also from McGill University, Montreal, Canada. She has gained more than 25 years of research experience in government, industrial, and academic environments. She has worked for the Biotechnology Research Institute of the National Research Council and SNC Research Corp., a subsidiary of SNC‑Lavalin, Montreal, Canada. She then joined Concordia University, Montreal, Canada in the Department of Building, Civil and Environmental Engineering in 1999. She has taught courses in site remediation, environmental engineering, fate and transport of contaminants and geoenvironmental engineering, and she conducts research in remediation of contaminated soils, sediments and water. She holds a Concordia Research Chair in Geoenvironmental Sustainability (Tier I) and is Full Professor and Associate Dean, Research and Graduate Studies of the Faculty of Engineering and Computer Science. She has authored more than 80 refereed papers in various journals, holds three patents and has supervised to completion more than 40 graduate students.
She is the Director of the new Concordia Institute of Water, Energy and Sustainable Systems. The new Institute will train students in sustainable development practices and promote research into new systems, technologies and solutions for water, energy and resource conservation. On June 26, 2012, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) announced that Concordia had received $ 1,643,700 in support of research and training via an Institute in Water, Energy and Sustainability. This is the first Concordia project to be awarded funding through NSERC’s Collaborative Research and Training Experience (CREATE) program.
Professional affiliations
- Order of Engineers of Québec,
- Canadian Society of Civil Engineering (chair of the Sustainable Development Committee)
- Canadian Geotechnical Society (VP Communications, Jan. 2013-Dec. 2014)
- Canadian Society of Chemical Engineering,
- ASTM (D18 and E5 committee member)
- American Institute of Chemical Engineering,
- Air and Waste Management Association,
- Association for the Environmental Health of Soils.
- Editorial Board Member for the Journal of Hazardous Materials and the Korean Journal of Civil Engineering.
Research
- Biosurfactant treatment of contaminated soils and sediments and water
- Treatment and management of metal-contaminated soils, sediments and mining wastes
- Bioremediation of hydrocarbons
- In situ processes for management of surface water and contaminated sediment
- Anaerobic treatment of wastewater
- Development of sustainability indicators
