In this Green Chemistry Commitment Info Session, you’ll hear from Dr. Nimrat Obhi, Higher Education Program Manager at Beyond Benign and from Dr. Oluwatoyin Asojo, Associate Director for Strategic Initiatives at the Dartmouth Cancer Center. Watch to learn more about the Green Chemistry Commitment, and to hear Dr. Asojo’s presentation on Hampton University‘s Green Chemistry journey.
Info Session – Green Chemistry Commitment (January 2023)
During our Green Chemistry Commitment (GCC) Info Session in January 2023, you will:
- Learn more about the GCC’s benefits and outcomes from a current GCC signer – The Green Chemistry Commitment at Texas Woman’s University (Dr. Nasrin Mirsaleh-Kohan, Associate Professor of Physics, Texas Woman’s University)
- Discover our latest initiatives for the Higher Education community including the Green Chemistry Teaching & Learning Community (GCTLC) Online Platform and our Minority Serving Institution (MSI) Initiative.
Info Session – Grant Program for Student Groups
Is your student group interested in applying for the ACS Green Chemistry Student Chapter Award? Are you from a Minority-Serving Institution (MSI) or does your group comprise and/or work with minority communities?
As part of our MSI Initiative, Beyond Benign is providing guidance and support to MSI/minority student groups to win awards for their green chemistry work! In this Info Session, you can hear more about Beyond Benign’s Grant Program, which offers funding to student groups to help them apply for an ACS Green Chemistry Student Chapter Award.
- Our featured speakers for this event are Carolyn Dewey and Josh Gann from the ACS-UMN Student Chapter (University of Minnesota, Twin Cities). ACS-UMN is a previous winner of an ACS Green Chemistry Student Chapter Award!
Info Session – Green Chemistry Commitment (October 2022)
During our Green Chemistry Commitment (GCC) Info Session, you will:
- Learn more about the GCC’s benefits and outcomes from Beyond Benign GCC leadership and a current GCC signer.
- Discover our latest initiatives for the Higher Education community including the Green Chemistry Teaching & Learning Community (GCTLC) Online Platform and our Minority Serving Institution (MSI) Initiative.
Invention with Intention: A Discussion with Dr. John Warner, Candidate for the American Chemical Society (ACS) President
Chemistry is everywhere. But it goes mostly unseen. Society has come to view the invisibility of chemistry as something insidious, like a monster under our beds, lurking, waiting to hurt us. Open up the newspaper, turn on the radio, look on the internet, we all know the stories: Carcinogens, Climate Change, Ocean Plastics, Endocrine Disruptors… When chemistry is visible, it’s usually not good. It doesn’t have to be this way. This presentation will discuss three necessary efforts that the chemical enterprises must undertake to maximize our ability to invent the future sustainably. (1) Broadening the chemistry community, (2) Invention education and (3) True multidisciplinarity. Invention with Intention requires that we continue to cultivate and celebrate the amazing things that chemistry is already well known for. But we must be more accessible to the non-chemistry community. Because at the end of the day, we do what we do – to serve them.
Learn more about Dr. John Warner, candidate for ACS President, by visiting his website.
Employing DOZN™ 2.0 – The Quantitative Greener Alternative Evaluator in Academic Settings for Safer Labs
This webinar covers how DOZN™ 2.0 can serve as a virtual resource for academics to utilize in laboratory courses and research settings. It will contain an overview of DOZN™ 2.0, specific rules for utilizing the tool in academic settings, access to a template worksheet for students, and select reactions with DOZN™ 2.0 scoring to serve as introductory examples. After this webinar instructors and students will understand how DOZN™ 2.0 functions in both industry and academic settings and the power it has for quantitatively identifying greener alternatives for chemical production.
Featured Speakers:
Dr. Ettigounder Ponnusamy, Fellow & Global Manager, Green Chemistry MilliporeSigma
Professor Irv Levy, Simmons University and Director of the Green Chemistry Commitment at Beyond Benign
Want to learn more about the methodologies behind DOZN™ 2.0? Check out the technical deep dive from Dr. Ettigounder Ponnusamy in our DOZN™ 2.0: A Quantitative Green Chemistry Evaluator webinar.
Transforming Chemistry Education: Models for Transitioning to Green Chemistry Education in Higher Education
This webinar about how the Green Chemistry Commitment (GCC) program is fostering a community of practice among higher education institutions through sharing resources and best practices in implementing green chemistry in their courses and programs. Through the GCC program, higher education participants incorporate green chemistry curricula, labs and courses into their chemistry department in their own unique way and with varied timelines to work towards adopting Green Chemistry Student Learning Objectives. Faculty members from the University of Michigan- Flint, University of Toronto and Seton Hall will share their experience in integrating Green Chemistry in their courses and programs, and how they are better preparing the incoming workforce with green chemistry skills to build a more sustainable future.
Featured Speakers:
Andrew Dicks, Professor, Teaching Stream, University of Toronto
Nick Kingsley, Associate Professor, University of Michigan – Flint
David Laviska, Assistant Professor, Seton Hall
Tools for Innovation in Chemistry from the ACS GCI Pharmaceutical Roundtable
The ACS Green Chemistry Institute Pharmaceutical Roundtable has publicly available tools for innovation in chemistry which may be of interest to those in academia and research beyond the pharmaceutical industry. This webinar will provide a tool overview that will assist to lower the barrier to use, the function of these tools and the tools relevance outside of pharmaceutical industry for students and educators. Our goal is to highlight and start a discussion of how these tools can be utilized by the academic community to prepare students for future careers where such tools are vital to decision making and processes. The community will then have a better understanding of the power of these open-access tools and how they can be integrated into green chemistry educational curriculum for student learning.
Featured Speaker:
Paul Richardson, Ph.D.
Director of Analytical and Synthetic Technologies, Pfizer
Co-Chair of the ACS Green Chemistry Institute Pharmaceutical Roundtable
Green Chemistry University Curriculum Webinar
This webinar will introduce the Yale-UNIDO Green Chemistry University Curriculum, a semester long course developed in collaboration with Beyond Benign. This FREE course is designed for undergraduate students and teaches (i) how the principles of green chemistry can help resolve global human health and environmental issues, (ii) how green chemistry functions and (iii) how it is implemented. The curriculum was developed as part of the Global Green Chemistry Initiative (GGCI), a joint initiative between the Center for Green Chemistry and Engineering at Yale and the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), and was funded by GEF (Global Environment Facility). This webinar will cover the content of the curriculum as well as how the content can be accessed and utilized by the community to practice sustainability through chemistry.
Featured Speakers:
Amy Cannon, Executive Director of Beyond Benign
Karolina Mellor, Program Manager at the Center for Green Chemistry and Engineering at Yale
Fueling Fall Investigations with Green Chemistry
Calling all K-12 chemistry teachers! Looking for safer labs for your students? How engaged are your students? Try these green chemistry labs that are both safe and exciting. Explore phenomena and fill your students with wonder while cultivating a sustainable environment culture in your lab by examining chemical or physical changes and endothermic or exothermic reactions. The best part of all? You don’t deal with complicated post-lab disposal methods. All labs featured use green chemistry principles and practices, and are safe for you, your students, and the environment.
Hear from Scott Carlson and Annette Sebuyira, two active New York high school teachers, and how they combine the inquiry process and green chemistry in their classroom to keep students engaged and curious. By sharing ready-to-use lesson plans, this webinar will spotlight NGSS-aligned, open-access resources designed by K-12 teachers.
This free event is co-organized by Beyond Benign and New York State Pollution Prevention Institute.
“Funding provided by the Environmental Protection Fund as administered by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. Any opinions, findings, and/or interpretations of data contained herein are the responsibility of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the opinions, interpretations or policy of Rochester Institute of Technology and its NYS Pollution Prevention Institute or the State.”
DOZN™ 2.0: A Quantitative Green Chemistry Evaluator
MilliporeSigma launched a new Green Chemistry tool, DOZN™ 2.0 this past spring. DOZN™ is an industry-first Quantitative Green Chemistry Evaluator that evaluates the relative greenness of chemicals and chemical processes against the 12 Principles of Green Chemistry. Through DOZN™ 2.0, scientists now have access to calculate the green scores of their own processes and products. This free, web-based tool provides users with even more data so that they are properly equipped to increase their sustainability. This webinar will introduce the tool and the methodology behind the evaluator.
Featured Speaker:
Dr. Ettigounder (Samy) Ponnusamy
Fellow and Global Manager, Green Chemistry
MilliporeSigma – A business of Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany
Want to utilize this industrial tool in academic settings? Check out our Employing DOZN™ 2.0 – The Quantitative Greener Alternative Evaluator in Academic Settings for Safer Labs webinar.
Green Chemistry – The Connection to Environmental Justice
Monique Harden (Assistant Director of Law and Policy and Community Engagement Program Manager, Deep South Center for Environmental Justice) and Martha Dina Arguello (Executive Director, Physicians for Social Responsibility Los Angeles)– two leaders of the environmental justice movement – introduced participants to the concept of environmental justice, how environmental injustice affects communities and the important role that green chemistry and green chemists can play in both improving community and ecosystem health and creating new economic opportunities for communities. Speakers discussed ways in which minority and lower income communities can become active participants in the green chemistry movement. This webinar was moderated by Dr. Joel Tickner (Professor of Environmental Health, University of Massachusetts Lowell).
Additional Information:
Green Chemistry: Inventing a Circular Economy through a Thermodynamic Lens
Speaker: Dr. John Warner, Warner Babcock Institute for Green Chemistry
The natural world is a beautiful and intricate system of intertwined and overlapping materials ecosystems. As humans, our understanding of the various interrelationships is only at the most basic level. One important reason why these naturally interdependent cyclic systems exist with exquisite complexity is because of the very fact that they all co-emerged over hundreds of thousands of years in the presence of one another. Evolutionary forces drove symbiotic relationships by selecting for and against mechanisms and materials that were conducive to the success of the entire multi-component matrix. As human society seeks to create a circular economy, we unfortunately have the disadvantage that our various industrial “species” have developed with a level of independence, essentially unaware of adjacent processes. We are forced into a position of creating connectivities that were not part of the considerations in the original design. Obviously this creates a daunting challenge. While there have been some examples of the circular economy designed and deployed in many industrial settings, the vast majority of industrial products and processes continue to exist disconnected and unsustainable over the long run. The pathway to create most of these technological ecosystems will require the inventive application of green chemistry (the molecular level mechanistic underpinnings of sustainability). Nature creates materials of such exquisite structural complexity and diversity that humans may never be able to mimic them. Nature’s elegance is even more astounding when one considers the fact that most chemistry in the biological world is carried out at ambient temperature and pressure using water, for the most part, as its reaction medium. For society to become truly sustainable, the way we manufacture, use and repurpose materials must change dramatically. This presentation will describe John Warner’s entropic considerations of materials design and illustrate their application through recent R&D examples from the Warner Babcock Institute of Green Chemistry.
ACS Green Chemistry Student Chapters: Models of Success
Speakers:
- Jennifer MacKellar, Program Manager, ACS Green Chemistry Institute
- Dr. Amy Keirstead, Interim Associate Dean, College of Arts & Sciences, Associate Professor of Chemistry, University of New England
- Jessica White, ACS Student Chapter President, University of New England
- Dr. Amanda Carroll, Lecturer of Chemistry, Tennessee Tech
- Jonah Ralston, Green Chemistry Chair, Tennessee Tech
Safer Made: Investing in Safer Chemistry and Consumer Products
Speaker: Dr. Marty Mulvihill, Ph.D
