Keynote Events

Professor Connor W. Coley: AI and the Expanding Computational Toolbox for Chemistry 

Chemistry has a long history of incorporating computation to understand molecules, predict behavior, and guide discovery. Progress in artificial intelligence, cheminformatics, and optimization methods has accelerated this trajectory, expanding the scale and scope of problems that can be approached computationally. Although many core challenges in chemistry remain far from solved, the computational tools available to chemists have advanced rapidly in both capability and accessibility, creating new opportunities to explore chemical space and reason about molecular systems.

In this lecture, I will discuss several areas where modern computational methods are changing how we approach problems in synthesis planning and therapeutic discovery, including developments in deep learning and generative modeling. I will also reflect on the importance of critically evaluating new technologies in a field characterized by both meaningful advances and substantial hype.  More broadly, as ACS marks its 150th anniversary, I hope to convey how the continuing integration of chemistry and computation is expanding the ways chemists formulate and investigate scientific questions. 

John C. Warner: Green Chemistry: The Missing Elements 

What would it take for the chemical enterprise to deliver products that are simultaneously high-performing, cost-competitive, and inherently safer for human health and the environment? Even under strong market pull—from regulators, customers, and value chains, the current state of chemistry and materials science limits our ability to fully meet that demand. A fundamental constraint is not intent, but training: most chemists and materials scientists are not educated in toxicology, environmental fate, or exposure pathways at the point of molecular and process design. As a result, hazard and sustainability are often addressed downstream—through controls, substitution under pressure, or compliance-driven reformulation—rather than designed into the product from the outset. Green chemistry reframes this paradigm. It focuses on eliminating hazard at the design stage—embedding considerations such as molecular toxicity, persistence, bioaccumulation, and lifecycle impact directly into R&D and scale-up decisions. Importantly, this is not a trade-off exercise: there is a growing body of industrial examples demonstrating that safer chemistries can meet or exceed performance targets while maintaining cost and manufacturability.

This presentation will outline the evolution of green chemistry from concept to industrial practice, highlight case studies where hazard elimination enabled innovation and market advantage, and identify actionable opportunities for integrating green chemistry principles into product development pipelines, from discovery through commercialization.