About

Colette Miller is a Principal Investigator at the Environmental Protection Agency, studying the impacts of environmental pollutants on maternal, paternal, and intragenerational health outcomes. Her work focuses on understanding how toxic substances affect different generations and health outcomes related to environmental exposures. She is associated with the UNC School of Medicine's Curriculum in Toxicology & Environmental Medicine and is involved in research that contributes to the understanding of environmental health risks.

Research topics

• Mechanics
• Computer science
• Mathematics
• Materials science
• Environmental science

Selected publications

• Water transport mechanisms during pressure-driven transport through polyamide nanogaps

  Physics of Fluids · 2025-01-01 · 6 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Molecular-scale simulations of pressure-driven transport through polyamide nanogaps (5–100 Å) were performed to investigate fundamental transport mechanisms. Results show that transport in nanogaps ≤ 10 Å is always subdiffusive, but superdiffusive transport was observed in nanogaps ≥ 20 Å. Near typical operating pressures for applications (Δp = 100 atm), only the 100 Å nanogap exhibited superdiffusive behavior. Since openings in common membrane materials are typically <20 Å, results indicate that subdiffusive to diffusive transport dominates for typical applications, such as reverse osmosis.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Semi-analytical solutions of passive scalar transport in generalized Newtonian fluid flow

  ArXiv.org · 2025-05-19

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  Transport during flow of generalized Newtonian fluids (GNFs) appears often in systems that can be treated in a simplified form as either cylindrical tubes or slit openings between parallel plates. Based on the pioneering work of Taylor, analytical solutions for transport in these simplified systems were derived generally. This includes analytical solutions for advection dominated transport, as well as a computation of the enhanced molecular diffusion coefficient in low Peclet number systems. The newly derived general solutions for species transport were applied to Cross and Carreau model fluids using a semi-analytical solution for velocity of these fluids. The semi-analytical solutions derived herein were compared to microscale simulations and showed agreement to within the numerical error of those simulations. The semi-analytical transport solutions derived here were developed without assuming any specific fluid rheology, thus these solutions can be applied to other non-Newtonian fluids, such as viscoelastic or viscoplastic fluids, as a straightforward extension of this work.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Temporal Fluctuations of Non-Equilibrium Water Accessible Pathways in Polyamide Reverse Osmosis Active Layers

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Semi-analytical solutions of passive scalar transport in generalized Newtonian fluid flow

  Physics of Fluids · 2025-08-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Transport during flow of generalized Newtonian fluids (GNFs) appears often in systems that can be treated in a simplified form as either cylindrical tubes or slit openings between parallel plates. Based on the pioneering work of Taylor, analytical solutions for transport in these simplified systems were derived generally. This includes analytical solutions for advection dominated transport, as well as a computation of the enhanced molecular diffusion coefficient in low Peclet number systems. These generally derived solutions were developed without assuming any specific fluid rheology and can predict transport when only a steady velocity field is known. The newly derived general solutions for species transport were applied to Cross and Carreau model fluids using a semi-analytical solution for velocity of these fluids. The semi-analytical solutions derived herein were compared to microscale simulations and showed agreement with the numerical error of those simulations. Because of the general nature of the transport solutions derived herein, these solutions can be applied to other non-Newtonian fluids, such as viscoelastic or viscoplastic fluids, as a straightforward extension of this work.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Temporal fluctuations of non-equilibrium water accessible pathways in polyamide reverse osmosis active layers

  Journal of Membrane Science Letters · 2025-08-15 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  Molecular-scale simulations of pressure-driven transport through polyamide domains were performed. Analysis revealed the importance of non-equilibrium molecular distributions and the existence of connected pathways from feed to permeate at all times. Individual pathways were found to be ephemeral with an observed upper bound persistence time of 1.75 ns. • Equilibrium assumptions misrepresent polyamide structure during operation. • Connected water pathways span the thickness of polyamide membranes. • The connected pathways are persistent but ephemeral.

  PublisherDOI

• Diabetes affects everything: Type 2 diabetes self‐management among Spanish‐speaking hispanic immigrants

  UNC Libraries · 2025-09-17

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  This article is a report of qualitative findings of a mixed-methods study of the relationships among knowledge, self-efficacy, health promoting behaviors, and type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) self-management among limited-english-proficient recent Hispanic immigrants, a population with increased incidence of T2DM and barriers to successful T2DM management. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 30 participants, and physiological and demographic data also were collected. The participants generally attributed developing the disease to strong emotions and viewed T2DM as a serious disease. Although a majority understood the importance of exercise and diet in T2DM self-management, other aspects such as medication adherence were not well-understood. Obstacles to effective T2DM self-management were negative interactions and communications with health care providers and other personnel, cultural stigma related to the disease, financial constraints, immigration status, and the complexity of the disease. Suggested interventions to improve the care and self-management of this at-risk population are discussed.

  PublisherDOI

• The impact of exercise prescription variables on intervention outcomes in low back pain disorders: an umbrella review of systematic reviews

  physioscience · 2025-05-01

  article

  The impact of exercise prescription variables on intervention outcomes in low back pain disorders: an umbrella review of systematic reviews

  PublisherDOI

• Multidimensional characterization of non-specific back pain: First results of the PREDICT-LBP study

  Brain and Spine · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Dilute Species Transport During Generalized Newtonian Fluid Flow in Porous Medium Systems

  Water Resources Research · 2025-01-01 · 5 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Dilute species transport in generalized Newtonian fluids (GNFs) is typically described using explanatory empirical approaches assuming a traditional Fickian form, which is an approach that lacks predictive ability for systems and conditions not specifically investigated. Dilute species transport was investigated for a wide range of Cross and Carreau fluids flowing through a set of monodisperse and polydisperse sphere pack porous media. Both microscale and macroscale simulations were performed to demonstrate that GNF fluid flow can be predicted based upon Newtonian characterization of the media and rheological characterization of the fluid. Dilute species transport was shown to have a Fickian limit with dispersivity dependent on the porous media, fluid properties, and the flow rate in a nonlinear fashion. Dimensionless analysis and symbolic regression was used to deduce an explanatory and predictive function to describe dispersivity in terms of relevant system properties, enabling prediction of dilute species transport for GNFs flowing through porous media that does not require any non-Newtonian experiments or parameter estimation.

  PublisherDOI

• Analysis of ‘Investigating an extended multiphase flow model that includes specific interfacial area’, Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering, 418:116594, 2024

  Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering · 2024-04-09 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Collaborative Research: CDI-Type II--Revolutionary Advances in Modeling Transport Phenomena in Porous Medium Systems

  NSF · $1.1M · 2009–2015

• Collaborative Research: Upscaled Mass Transfer Coefficients for Modeling Dissolution of Nonaqueous Phase Liquids in Homogeneous and Heterogeneous Porous Media in the Field

  NSF · $196k · 2005–2008

• Advancing Mechanistic Understanding of Two-Fluid-Phase Flow in Porous Medium Systems

  NSF · $461k · 2016–2019

• Elucidating Physicochemical Processes Affecting Transport Phenomena Resulting from Hydraulic Fracturing of Natural Gas Reservoirs

  NSF · $340k · 2016–2019

• CMG: Multiphase Porous Medium Dynamics: Pore to Field Scale

  NSF · $662k · 2003–2008

Frequent coauthors

• William G. Gray

  91 shared

• Matthew W. Farthing

  United States Army

  58 shared

• James E. McClure

  46 shared

• Christopher E. Kees

  34 shared

• Joseph A. Pedit

  29 shared

• Paul T. Imhoff

  24 shared

• A. L. Dye

  Office of Chief Medical Examiner

  22 shared

• C. T. Kelley

  North Carolina State University

  22 shared