Beyond Benign

Promoting Science Literacy

This month, Dr. Margaret Kerr was awarded the George I. Alden Excellence in Teaching Award during Worcester State College’s commencement services.

Dr Kerr has received widespread recognition for her leadership in the development of green chemistry curricula. Under her direction, Worcester State College adopted a green chemistry curriculum for its organic laboratory classes four years ago, the first school in the area to do so. She was awarded a Fulbright Senior Scholar Grant in 2007 to go to Thailand to promote green chemistry curriculum development at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok.

Recently, we were fortunate to catch up with Margaret:

Benign Bylines: How long ago did you move from industry to academia?

Margaret Kerr: I started at Worcester State in the fall of 2000; before that I worked in industry for two years, with Fina Oil, which is now the Total Group.

You did catalysis work at Fina?

Yes, I worked with metallocene catalysis for polypropylene production. We did the catalysis work as well as the production work.

Was there any relationship to Green Chemistry Principle #9 with that catalysis work?

Not intentionally, actually I’d never heard of it [Green Chemistry].  I got my post-doc at the University of Florida which had a fairly heavy industrial influence. My original goal of becoming a college professor was sidetracked by industry waving money my way. I wasn’t specifically looking for work in the oil industry, but it was a good job offer, and I thought, rather naively, that maybe I could work from the inside to make some changes. That was how I justified it in my own head. I realized when I was there that I didn’t even know what questions to ask to have a positive impact! I think, looking back, that’s what prompted my interest in Green Chemistry. I heard about it about a year after I left industry. I thought “if I had known this before I left industry, perhaps I could have been smarter about how I did my job.”

How did you hear about Green Chemistry?

A flyer crossed my desk for the Green Chemistry & Education workshop in Oregon.

I’ve noticed you’ve kept up a very strong relationship with GEMs & the team in Oregon.

Yes, I did the workshop, I forget what year it was - maybe ‘02.  I went back 3 subsequent years to speak. and have done various collaborative work with Julie [Haack], first just the two of us and then  with the GC Ed Net.

So you went to the workshop, and you were able to immediately transform what you guys did there at Worcester State, were you immediately able to implement it (Green Chemistry)?

I had a very rare opportunity. I realize in retrospect how rare it actually was. My background is in organometallics so when I got the job at Worcester State it was technically for an inorganic person. The first question they asked was “can you teach organic?”  So, I sort of do both and at the same time I am supposed to teach the organic lab. I’ve never really liked organic lab. I taught it for two years under a person who had been at Worcester State for a long, long time. He retired rather suddenly and they didn’t have a replacement for him, so basically, they put me in charge of it.  I said ‘well, can I make some changes?’ They said ‘well, yeah we don’t care what you do as long as it is pedagogically sound.’ Right about that time was when I heard about the Oregon workshop.  I went there and got all fired up about Green Chemistry and proceeded to throw out all our old “brown” labs and put in green labs. Which in itself is perhaps indicitive of my lack of foresight - starting things and not anicipating problems. So we did it whole-hog the first year and hired a new organic person who was excited about Green Chemistry as well and since then we’ve had all sorts of labs that we’ve tried, some we’ve discarded. The nice thing about doing it all at once was that we really didn’t have a chance to revert to the old labs because it’s a lot of work to make a full-on curriculum change. And as I’ve thought about it over the years, I’m glad we did it that way.  It was difficult to do at first.  Most people tend to gradually implement massive undertakings like this.

Did you find that you could swap out most of the “brown” organic labs with green ones?

Yes, we pretty much changed everything. There were a few labs that were technique-driven; they’re neither green nor brown really, they’re just techniques labs. The more developed or involved labs are all green - some greener than others. As in industry and research, sometimes we can’t make an experiment entirely green all at once because we haven’t figured out how. We test new ones every year, trying to improve them; some work, some don’t.

You’ve kept up your collaborations since Oregon. How have your collaborations benefitted the field of Green Chemistry and your own efforts?

I think that if you look at it from both directions, the collaborations have not just been beneficial, but essential to what I’ve been able to do. My organic chemistry program has benefitted from the collaboration, Worcester State College has recognized Green Chemistry’s importance and has become a strong supporter, even using it as a fund-raising technique.

We just hired a new person as a green chemist and our board of trustees wants us to do a formal Green Chemistry concentration. So, we’ve had a lot of benefits coming to us from the collaborations. I think that from me going out, the collaborations have been beneficial because it has resulted in different types of publications, like the new edition of Chemistry for Changing Times text book, which features Green Chemistry in every chapter. The collaborative effort made that happen fairly quickly and the text that Irv Levy is editing for the ACS should be out soon. Irv’s edition of (insert title) is collaborative as well; I co-wrote a chapter for the text with David M. Brown from Davidson College in North Carolina. I think that a large part of what I enjoy about all these activities is the community aspect of it.  People do want to work together to enhance everybody’s programs.

You got a really nice compliment from Andrea Roberts, a visiting instructor at Wesleyan University; you inspired her to go green.

We did a sort of two person workshop at Wesleyan a few years ago. Andrea’s also had the unique opportunity to make changes without a lot of people fighting it. She’s managed to implement a lot of green into their second semester organic chemistry lab that she’s teaching.

Have you seen a change in the students, perhaps an increase in the students interested in chemistry as a result of incorporating Green Chemistry?

It’s hard to pinpoint if it’s Green Chemistry related or economically driven, but we have had a huge increase in the number of students taking chemistry courses. That reflects our chemistry majors as well as the biology and biotechnology majors. One thing that stands out is the way that Green Chemistry stays with the students and that, without even being prompted, students will actually include a green component in an assignment that they write for a upper level course; so the message is getting out there and the students really respond to it.

How did you decide on going to Thailand?

Well actually, when I decided to go on sabbatical, I wanted to do something internationally, this had been one of my dreams. When I started thinking about it I decided I wanted to go to southeast asia because I’m interested in the big picture of SE asia. I started asking around the Green Chemistry community and pretty much everybody said ‘contact this person named Supawan Tantayanon’ and because (she’s what I call a force of nature) she gets a lot done,  I contacted Supawan and very politely asked if she knew anybody in the area that would like to host someone on sabbatical. She wrote me right back and said, “Nope, I don’t know anyone else, but you have to come and stay with me at my school.” It turned out that the Fulbright was a really likely source of funding. Combining the scientific aspects of Green Chemistry with the social and cultural aspects of a Fulbright appealed to the program leaders. It’s very important to Fulbright that there be a cultural and social aspect as well as the collaborations in your field of study. I wrote my proposal based on sustainable development  and Green Chemistry in the context of the booming economic growth and subsequent environmental decay that’s going along with it. Thailand wasn’t really a first or second choice, it just kind of evolved that way because of the connection with Supawan. While I was there I had the opportunity to travel all over Thailand and also visit Hanoi, Vietnam and Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, so I was thoroughly exposed to  the area and gained a sense of the cultural aspects; particularly of Thailand.  I learned what it’s like to live there and how it compares to western economic and cultural systems.

Do you find them very accepting of Green Chemistry? Do you see any cultural reasons why they might or might not place a high importance on Green Chemistry?

Everybody that I talk to is really really eager to hear more about Green Chemistry. In Thailand, in particular, it resonated with their king, who is the longest reigning monarch in the world; he turned 80 while we were there. He’s done a lot with sustainable and rural development and he has a model he’s been talking about for a number of years called ‘sufficiency economy’ which is basically to maintain Thailand’s ability to take care of itself and encourage people to take on less risky ventures in everything they do whether its economic or social. The people really revere their king and they really want to do what he tells them to do.  Green Chemistry fits right in because it is a way for them to maintain their environment while still meeting their material needs. There is rampant development going on and they’re bombarded with both eastern and western elements of growth. When you talk to people there’s this real conflict between wanting to do what their king wants and their training as traditional western scientists: ‘make it quick, make it fast and don’t worry about the consequences. There’s a real conflict with the people that you talk to at all levels, particularly students trying to figure out what they’re going to do. I talked to people all over the area and got the same sort of messege from them. I really think Green Chemistry can take hold and my impression is that it’s not going to be the older faculty, but the students and the graduate students that are going to be making those changes. Hopefully it won’t be too late for their society.

Margaret, you’ve been really busy..the Fullbright, teaching, writing, developing new laboratory experiments...what’s coming up next?

Well, we’re trying to maintain our international collaboration, part of what we’re doing reflects some of the Fullbright goals as well as my own goals with Green Chemistry, to create an exchange program between Chulalongkorn University in Bankock and my school (Worcester State).  We’ve already hosted one person from there and we’re supposed to have another student coming in the fall, and hopefully more students, as well, from Chulalongkorn to Worcester State. We’re trying to pull that together, which may require a trip to Thailand this summer.  That would break my heart (laughter).

It’s interesting just coming back from being abroad for six months. It’s such a completetly different place. Just trying to figure out everything…putting everything into context I guess. I’m not sure I’ve been successful in doing that. It’s only been in the last month that I’ve truly felt that I’m totally home and trying to figure out where I’m going to go next. So I don’t have an answer for part of your question because I’m sort of getting it together myself.  It feels like this “big thing” has happened, and then “where do we go from there.”  I’m trying to put the pieces together with the Green Chemistry research that I do with my students - I always have a couple of students working for me. I’ll try to get a research course implemented at Worcester State, so we can actually get credit for doing research, instead of just on top of everything else we do. So small stuff, big stuff - it’s all coming together.

What was most striking - chemistry or cultural - experience you had?

Every day was like this new surprise. You’d think you’d seen it all and then you’d see five people riding one motorbike. It’s such a completely different place. I think what I came out with was this real sense of acceptance from the Thai people even though I was very different from them. It’s a very homogenious society. I feel like I made friends there and it was certainly with professional people as well as the students that I met and with Supawan. Perhaps what struck me the most was the response that I got, in particular from graduate and undergraduate students - the idea that the future doesn’t need to be as bleak as it is portrayed in the world-wide media; that Green Chemistry is something where students really can be part of the solution rather than part of the overall problem.  I found that that message resonats with students. You talk to students that want to be scientists and they’re really torn by this same-old, same-old and being told that ‘you can use this skill to be problem solvers instead of problem makers. I really got that from the Thais and from Vietnamese and Malaysians too. It’s really so visually obvious there what’s going on. You look out the window and there’s pollution and you have construction and you have growth and you just wonder what’s going to happen.

How is it different from your students here?

In a lot of ways the students were very similar. I think that being young and worried about the future - a lot of the problems are the same, no matter where you go. Something that became really obvious to me is that people worry about the same things: no one ever has enough money, fuel is expensive, people worry about what’s going to happen with their children and if they’re going to make it.  I think that the concerns are really the same, just with a cultural twist. So in that regard, I think that they’re very similar.  Certainly different life circumstances, but the same fundamentals: ‘what am I doing with my life’ it’s the same for everybody.

Congratulations on the Alden Excellence in Teaching award you’re receiving!

This award really is because of Green Chemistry - students respond to it.  What’s really interesting is that when all this started, it was “well, Margaret’s going to make a change in the organic lab and we really don’t care about that, it doesn’t impact us. Now, we have a group that is really involved and excited about Green Chemistry and we get some really important and good feedback from our industrial advisory board about training students in ideas of toxicity and sustainability and that type of thing.  It’s gone well beyond me at this point and so as far as program development goes, if I stopped doing it right now - which I don’t intend to - it would continue forward.  It’s not just a single person at this point, and that pleases me.

Thank you very much for your time, Margaret!