EUGENE–A University of Oregon graduate student who is helping to make fundamental changes in how future chemists are taught is the recipient of this year’s Kenneth G. Hancock Memorial Student Award in Green Chemistry.

Scott Reed, a fifth-year doctoral degree student in chemistry, won the American Chemical Society (ACS) award for his role in developing the world’s first organic green chemistry instructional laboratory for undergraduates at the University of Oregon.

The prestigious award is bestowed on just one student each year who is working in the growing area of green chemistry. Reed will receive the award on Monday, June 26, during the annual ACS Green Chemistry and Engineering Conference in Washington, D.C.

Green chemistry methods seek to reduce the potential for hazard in chemistry by finding creative ways to minimize the human and environmental impact without stifling scientific progress. While green chemistry principles are occasionally taught in organic chemistry classrooms, green chemistry experiments did not make it into instructional laboratories until the UO’s pilot green chemistry lab in 1998, a lab Reed and other graduate students helped design.

Reed got interested in the project after his adviser, Jim Hutchison, began researching green chemistry as a way to reduce reliance on the limited lab safety equipment necessary to protect students from the toxic chemicals used in traditional organic lab. Jim Hutchison, an assistant professor of chemistry, solicited the help of fellow chemistry professor Ken Doxsee to help design the groundbreaking curriculum.

"This award is another confirmation that what we’re doing at the UO is leading the nation in green chemistry education," Hutchison says.

While it is unusual for graduate students to be involved in curriculum-development, Reed applied for and was awarded a special fellowship through the U.S. Department of Education, which provided him funding to focus on designing new experiments. Although work on his doctoral project had to be put on the back burner, Reed says the experience was worth the extra effort and will forever influence the way he looks at chemistry.

"Anyone who’s doing chemistry is pulling chemicals off the shelf, and anyone can use the concepts of green chemistry in deciding what they pull off the shelf," he says. "Someday, green chemistry will just be the way chemistry is done."

Dr. Kenneth G. Hancock, for whom the award serves as a memorial, was director of the National Science Foundation’s Division of Chemistry and one of the earliest proponents of green chemistry. Hancock was an active advocate emphasizing the role of chemists and chemistry not only in solving environmental problems of the past, but also in avoiding environmental problems in the future in an economically viable fashion.

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