Professor Mohai recently returned from a leave of absence to serve as Senior Policy Advisor at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Environmental Justice. His teaching and research interests are focused on environmental justice, public opinion and the environment, and influences on environmental policy making. He is a founder of the Environmental Justice Program at the University of Michigan and a major contributor to the growing body of quantitative research examining disproportionate environmental burdens and their impacts on low income and people of color communities. In 1990, he co-organized with Dr. Bunyan Bryant the “Michigan Conference on Race and the Incidence of Environmental Hazards”, which was credited by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as one of two events bringing the issue of Environmental Justice to the attention of the Agency. He is author or co-author of numerous articles, books, and reports focused on race and the environment, including “Black Environmentalism“, Environmental Racism: Reviewing the Evidence”, “Race and the Incidence of Environmental Hazards”, “Toxic Waste and Race at Twenty”, “Which Came First, People or Pollution?” and “Environmental Justice and the Flint Water Crisis”. His research involves national level studies examining the causes of environmental disparities and the role environmental factors play in accounting for racial and socioeconomic disparities in health. He is currently Lead Investigator on a project for the U.S Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) to advance development and use of the EPA’s leading environmental justice screening tool, EJSCREEN.

Professor Mohai is a member of the Michigan Advisory Council on Environmental Justice to the State of Michigan and a past member of the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council (NEJAC) to the U.S. EPA (2007-2013). He is also a member of the Advisory Board of the Global Environmental Justice Movement Project (ENVJUSTICE) which is documenting and mapping environmental justice conflicts around the world (http://www.envjustice.org/). Professor Mohai has provided testimony on environmental justice to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1993, 1999, and 2019, the U.S. Senate in 2007, and the Michigan Civil Rights Commission in 2016.