Amanda Hughes, PhD

On behalf of her clients, Amanda applies statistics, chemistry, and history to craft compelling and defensible narratives of contaminated sites. She regularly supports litigation on behalf of industrial clients, in-house counsel, and nationally-recognized law firms, applying forensic analysis to a variety of contaminants, with a focus on PCBs and PFAS. As an expert witness, Amanda has opined on the fate and transport of PCBs at a contaminated sediment site; she also provides technical insight into PCB sources, including inadvertently-generated PCB congeners. At multiple high-profile sites, Amanda has helped clients understand their contributions of PFAS to the environment while also helping them distinguish these contributions from background and other local sources.

Amanda supports her clients in extra-legal mediation, environmental litigation, toxic torts, and cleanups under federal and state regulatory programs. She is adept at developing multiple lines of evidence, including conceptual site models, facility-specific histories, data visualization techniques, and chemical fingerprinting tools (like principal component analysis and positive matrix factorization). Taken together, these lines of evidence tell a single, compelling, and defensible narrative that successfully identifies additional responsible parties, informs legal strategy, and minimizes her clients’ liabilities.

Contact Amanda at ahughes@geosyntec.com.