ACS Institute Gets New Director

Organic chemist Paul T. Anastas of the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy has been selected to serve as the first full-time director of the American Chemical Society’s Green Chemistry Institute. He will leave his position as assistant director for the environment at OSTP and assume the role of GCI director in June.

ACS Executive Director and CEO Madeleine Jacobs, who serves as chair of GCI’s governing board, says she’s “thrilled” that Anastas will lead GCI. “Paul is widely regarded as one of the fathers of green chemistry and brings to this position his passion, creativity, dedication, and contacts around the world.”

At EPA in the early 1990s, Anastas and his colleagues developed the green chemistry movement to assist chemists and the chemical industry in efforts to prevent industrial pollution. GCI was founded in 1997 as a nonprofit organization to promote green chemistry, and in 2001, it joined ACS to further advance its mission.

Anastas, 41, has a Ph.D. degree in chemistry from Brandeis University. He replaces Dennis L. Hjeresen as GCI director. Hjeresen stepped down from the post in December 2003 to turn full attention to his work as pollution prevention and sustainability program manager at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

“The potential of green chemistry to advance both environmental and economic goals is as limitless as the creativity and ingenuity of chemists,” Anastas says. “I believe the Green Chemistry Institute is playing an important and essential role in catalyzing these advances.” He adds that industrial adoption of green chemistry is essential and that GCI “will be doing everything it can to help facilitate this process.”