School Notes: School of the Environment
September/October 2018

F&ES awards grants for “uncommon” collaborations

The Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies (F&ES) has announced the recipients of the first Leitner Awards for Uncommon Environmental Collaborations, a grant fund that promotes collaborations for environmental teaching and research across the Yale campus—particularly on areas identified by the recent F&ES strategic plan. One of the grants will go to a team of researchers from F&ES, the School of Engineering & Applied Science, and the Department of Computer Science—and led by F&ES professors Xuhui Lee and Justin Farrell—that is developing bicycle-mounted “smart thermometers” for use on the Yale campus to monitor heat stress in the urban landscape. The other grant will go to a team from F&ES and the Schools of Public Health and Engineering & Applied Science—led by F&ES professor Shimon Anisfeld—that is designing a course to promote new thinking on urban sanitation. The grants were made possible by a generous gift from James Leitner ’75.

‘Meta’ review examines growth of green chemistry

In 1998, Paul Anastas coauthored a book that introduced 12 principles of “green chemistry,” an emerging field that aimed to make chemistry and related processes cleaner and safer through scientific design. Two decades later, the principles of green chemistry infiltrate nearly every industrial sector and are taught at universities across the world. In a recent paper published in the journal Green Chemistry, Anastas, now a professor at Yale, and a team of coauthors document the range of scientific research and inventions that have emerged from green chemistry. Framed around those 12 principles, the “meta-review” explores the growth achieved within each of the principles and identifies areas where challenges and opportunities remain. Inspired by the iconic tree diagrams that illustrate the range of applications for particular raw materials, the paper also introduces an illustrated “Green ChemisTREE,” which charts the diversity of research and achievements stemming from each of the principles.