Dr. Muhoro is an environmental organic chemist who studies how pesticides break down in rivers and how we might better remove them.

Dr. Muhoro has a B.S. in Chemistry from St. Lawrence University and a Ph.D. in Chemistry from Yale University. She completed postdoctoral training at the University of California, Berkeley, and taught introductory chemistry at UC Santa Barbara before moving to Towson. She is also a research advisor to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), where she helps build programs to promote collaborations that involve scientists in developing countries.

Dr. Muhoro brings students from Towson to Kenya (where she grew up) to conduct fieldwork on the effects of pesticides in the rivers and to build collaborative relationships with scientists there. Currently, her work focuses on a class of pesticides called N-methyl carbamates (NMCs), which are popular because they have relatively low impact on air quality. However, they break down in water into toxic chemicals that pose risks to both humans and the environment. In particular, Dr. Muhoro wants to study how NMCs break down in tropical environments because most research has focused on temperate environments.

In a recent paper, she collected information about the relevant environmental conditions (temperature, pH, etc.) in the Ruiru River in Kenya and the Guayas River in Ecuador, two tropical environments where there is a lot of agriculture and pesticide use. Recreating these conditions in the lab, she showed that different NMCs break down faster in hotter temperatures and more alkaline environments. However, in both environments, NMCs continue to persist for months.

Next, she investigated possible materials that could be used to “clean up” NMCs and their toxic by-products once they’ve gone into the river. These materials need to be easily accessible, non-toxic, and not too expensive to be practical - especially in developing countries. Of the different materials tested, charcoal worked the best. Thus, further work will focus on figuring out the most practical way to use charcoal for this purpose.