Donna Riley is currently the Jim and Ellen King Dean of Engineering and Computing at University of New Mexico.

Going from an all girls high school to Princeton, Riley was shocked to realize that many of her peers felt that women didn’t belong in engineering.

[3] Riley started her professional career as a clayton postdoctoral fellow in industrial ecology at Princeton University.

For 2 years she worked with electronic markets for second-hand goods, and on the industrial ecology of mercury, as well as its cultural and religious uses.

[4] In 2017 Riley left Virginia Tech to become the Kamyar Haghighi Head of the School of Engineering Education at Purdue University.

[5] On 15 November 2022, the University of New Mexico named Dr. Riley as the dean of the UNM School of Engineering, effective on 1 April 2023.