Green Chemistry
UO Chemistry Student Receives National Honors for His Efforts

A University of Oregon chemistry student is helping to make the world a little greener, and his efforts are being noticed nationally.

Scott Reed, a fifth-year doctoral student in chemistry, recently received the Kenneth G. Hancock Memorial Student Award in Green Chemistry for his role in developing the world’s first organic green chemistry instructional laboratory for undergraduates at the UO. Presented by the American Chemical Society to just one student per year, the award carries tremendous prestige for those working in the growing area of green chemistry.

Reed, who accepted his award this summer in Washington, D.C., says winning the Hancock Award added legitimacy to the project. “They [the committee] appreciate that one of the best ways to make a conceptual change in chemistry is to change the way we educate people,” he said.

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 occasionally are 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 that Reed and other graduate students helped design.

Reed became interested in helping develop the lab after his advisor, chemistry professor Jim Hutchison, began researching green chemistry as a way to reduce reliance on the limited lab safety equipment that is necessary to protect students from the toxic chemicals used in traditional organic labs. Hutchison and fellow professor Ken Doxsee began to design the curriculum, and they recruited several graduate students to help.

Reed’s role was to research and modify experiments that would work within the space and time restrictions of an instructional lab setting. It turned out to be a very big challenge. “For every lab we changed, there was a lot of effort involved,” he says.

The key challenge the lab designers faced was to find experiments that would teach the same skills and techniques as a traditional lab, but use more benign chemicals to illustrate those concepts, says Reed. Although green experiments existed in the literature, none were tailored to the time restrictions of a student lab.

One of Reed’s most noteworthy accomplishments is the adaptation of an experiment to synthesize adipic acid, a chemical used to make nylon. Typically, nitric acid is used as the oxidant. An unfortunate byproduct is nitrous oxide, a chemical that contributes to ozone depletion. The green version substitutes a low concentration of hydrogen peroxide as an alternative to the nitric acid, making the experiment much less hazardous. Reed was able to modify and optimize the experiment for the teaching laboratory. The Journal of Chemical Education recently accepted his experiment for publication this year.

While it is unusual for graduate students to be involved in curriculum development, Reed received a special fellowship through the Department of Education, which provided him with funding to focus on designing the new experiments. Reed says although work on his doctoral project sometimes had to be put on the back burner, 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,” Reed says. “Someday, green chemistry will just be the way chemistry is done.”

The UO eventually plans to convert all organic chemistry labs to the green format. Professor Hutchison says he hopes students of green chemistry will carry their new knowledge with them to work. “We really believe that the experiments students learn will help plant the seed to use these kinds of chemistry in industrial settings,” he says. Perhaps they can teach their co-workers to think a little harder about what they pull off that shelf.

Photo: Scott Reed at work in the chemistry lab. (Photo by Cindy Lundeen)