Anastas Honored for "Green Chemistry"

Paul T. Anastas, Professor in the Practice of Green Chemistry, Yale was honored on May 4 by the Council of Scientific Society Presidents with their Leadership in Science award for founding the field of “Green Chemistry.”

Paul T. Anastas, Professor in the Practice of Green Chemistry, Yale was honored on May 4 by the Council of Scientific Society Presidents with their Leadership in Science award for founding the field of “Green Chemistry.”

Known as “The Father of Green Chemistry,” having coined the term in 1991, Anastas has worked to develop the field over the past 17 years. He joined the Yale faculty in 2007, where he serves as Director of the Center for Green Chemistry and Green Engineering, which advances the sciences, education and use of sustainable technologies.

The Council of Scientific Society Presidents is an organization of presidents, presidents-elect, and recent past presidents of about 60 scientific federations and societies. The combined membership numbers well over 1.4 million scientists and science educators in 150 disciplines. Each year the council confers its Citation for Leadership and Achievement to individuals in honor of their special achievements in support of scientific research.

“I am honored and pleased to present the award to Paul Anastas,” said Council President, Martin Apple, “for his strategic and bold vision and pioneering initiatives that created the global green chemistry enterprise, for his breakthrough research that created economic incentives to reduce industrial waste, for leading the U.S.A. to sponsor the Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge, and N.S.F to create the technology for a sustainable environment program, for founding the Green Chemistry Institute, for preventing millions of kilograms of hazardous chemicals from entering the environment, [and] for his 12 principles redirecting progress on chemical frontiers to address key 21st century challenges.”

Anastas focuses his research on the design of safer chemicals, bio-based polymers, and new methodologies of chemical synthesis that are more efficient and less hazardous to the environment. He has published nine books and numerous papers on the subject of science and technology for sustainability.

Before coming to Yale, Anastas he was the director of the Green Chemistry Institute, headquartered at the American Chemical Society in Washington, D.C., where he established 24 green chemistry chapters in countries around the world, including China, Ethiopia, India, Japan, and South Africa. In a prior position with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, he spent five years as the principal supporter within the administration for governmental programs related to the environment.

Anastas holds joint appointments at Yale in the School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, the Department of Chemistry, and the Department of Environmental Engineering. He received his B.S from the University of Massachusetts and his Ph.D from Brandeis University.

Among his numerous awards are the John Jeyes Medal from the Royal Society of Chemistry and the H. John Heinz III Award for the Environment, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Joseph Seifter Award, their highest scientific recognition.

Previous recipients of the award include Nobel laureates F. Sherwood Rowland and Dudley Hirschbach, President of the National Academy of Sciences Bruce Alberts and former Dean of Yale Engineering D. Alan Bromley.



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Janet Rettig Emanuel: janet.emanuel@yale.edu, 203-432-2157