Sustainability Grants

ACS Sustainable Futures Initiative Grant Program

The ACS Campaign for a Sustainable Future aims to advance chemistry innovations to address the challenges articulated in the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals. This multifaceted initiative will have lasting impact on how we conduct research, how we teach chemistry, and how we collaborate globally. The initiative begins with a campaign to fully engage the chemistry community in designing solutions to the grand challenges of sustainability, reimagining how we teach and practice chemistry with a sustainability focus, and raising public awareness among about chemistry’s role in a sustainable future. One of the key initiatives of the Campaign is a grant program, which aims to provide catalytic funding for early and mid-career faculty interested in developing a research and teaching portfolio that contributes directly to developing transformative chemistries that address Sustainable Development Goals.

Kelvin Bates, Assistant Professor at CU Boulder

Project Title: Testing and Design of Atmospherically Benign Substitutes for Perfluoroalkyl Substances

Dr. Bates' research combines experimental and modeling tools to identify how organic gases in the atmosphere react to produce harmful air pollutants like ozone and particulate matter, and to quantify the impacts of these pollutants on human health and global climate. His team develops mass spectrometric methods for detection and quantification of trace organic gases in the atmosphere and incorporates the chemistry of those gases into detailed atmospheric models to simulate their fates. By better understanding these chemical processes that control ozone and particle formation, Dr. Bates’s project can determine the steps that individuals and institutions can take to mitigate air pollution.

Jesse Gordon – Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University

Project Title: Sustainable Strategies for Radical Amination Catalysis

Photo- and electro-redox methods have blossomed in the past decade owing to the ability to generate reactive intermediates for the activation of reticent substrate bonds. However, the field has yet to evolve sustainably. Most reported methods are characterized by extremely low quantum yields (for photoredox) or extremely low faradaic efficiencies (for electroredox). With detailed mechanistic studies, Dr. Gordon has developed more sustainable photoredox methods by moving the excitation wavelength of light from the UV to visible spectral region and delivering highly reactive radicals to organic substrates at high quantum yields. He is at the forefront of a generation of scientists who have come to realize the importance of incorporating sustainability into the design of new synthetic methodologies.

Heather O. LeClerc – Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University

Project Title: Enabling a Renewable Carbon-Based Economy by Unraveling Complex Organic Mixtures

Dr. LeClerc will strive to redefine how we handle organic waste upcycling through the combination of advanced analytics and reaction engineering by developing reductive models to accurately identify lumped metrics without oversimplifying chemical complexity. Despite years of research into organic and plastic waste valorization, feedstock heterogeneity and the presence of contaminants remain significant bottlenecks to upcycling and utilization of real-world wastes. Her research will harness high-resolution mass spectrometry (HRMS) techniques to deconvolve the tens of thousands of compounds present in organic waste streams to facilitate the modeling, implementation, and process control of targeted reactions to achieve near-complete waste valorization.

Michael Lawrence McGraw – Assistant Professor at University of Arkansas

Project Title: A Sustainable Polyaddition Platform for Degradable Polyesters

Dr. McGraw’s team works at the interface of organic, polymer, and green chemistry. His research focuses on developing new catalysts, reactions, methods, and strategies for sustainable polymer/material synthesis. He uses a fundamentals approach to take bond-forming chemistries and translate them to polymerization with the aim of making polymers/materials cleanly and efficiently while integrating built-in chemical solutions for bio-degradation, recyclability, and utilization of bio-renewable carbon.

Lauren Pincus – Assistant Professor at George Washington University

Project Title: Fueling a circular economy: selective recovery of endangered elements from photovoltaic waste using ion-imprinted biopolymers

Given the rapid expansion in the use of photovoltaic (PV) technology, there is a pressing need to develop sustainable solutions to handle end-of-life PV waste which is expected to reach ~80 million tons by 2050. Endangered elements utilized in solar cells such as silver (Ag) are trace elements on a per mass basis however, they account for much of the economic value of a PV system. Given the expected critical shortages of these endangered elements, recovery from PV waste also offers benefits from a sustainability perspective. Dr. Pincus’s group will design materials to selectively “mine” endangered elements from PV waste. Research efforts will also focus on desorption/recovery of the mined elements. Thus, building towards the overall goal of utilizing recovered endangered elements as raw materials in the PV manufacturing process.

Duhan Zhang – Postdoctoral Associate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Project Title: Transforming Tailings and Low-grade Ores into Green Steel and Rare Earth Concentrates: Achieving Zero Carbon Emissions and Waste

Dr. Zhang’s research focuses on advancing electrochemical systems for energy storage and resource recovery. By developing innovative processes and characterization techniques spanning atomic to industrial scales, she aims to enhance efficiency, scalability, and minimize environmental impact of technologies such as batteries, green manufacturing, sustainable mining, and waste valorization. Embracing the principles of circular economy, her work prioritizes designing systems powered by clean electricity that enable resource reuse and recycling to reduce waste. In the era of "electrification of everything," Dr. Zhang strives to deliver solutions that are technically robust, economically viable, and enduring.

Xiaohui Xu – Assistant Professor at Rowan University

Project Title: Integrated Lithium Extraction and Water Recovery

Dr. Xu’s research centers on the development of polymeric materials for environmental remediation utilizing biodegradable polymers and environmentally friendly synthesis methods. This work bridges core polymer science with practical approaches to sustainability, integrating fundamental science with real-world applications. She aims to create innovative solutions addressing global challenges, particularly clean water technologies. In the future, Dr. Xu plans to expand her scope to include resource recovery, with the goal of minimizing waste and promote reusability. These efforts highlight the critical role that sustainable materials play in addressing urgent environmental issues.

Milad Abolhasani – ALCOA Professor & University Faculty Scholar at North Carolina State University

Project Title: A Sustainable Research Acceleration Framework for CO2 Photoreduction Using Self-Driving Labs

Sabbatical Host: ETH Zurich

Leveraging his expertise in flow chemistry and autonomous experimentation, Dr. Abolhasani will partner with experts at ETH Zurich to harness self-driving labs (SDLs) to mitigate climate change by converting greenhouse gases into value-added products. Specifically, the proposed research will focus on utilizing SDLs to rapidly identify robust, energy-efficient strategies for scalable carbon dioxide upgrading. By integrating advanced flow reactor designs with automated experimentation and data-driven modeling, they aim to accelerate catalyst selection and reaction optimization.

Grace Wan-Ting Chen – Associate Professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell

Project Title: Bio-Inspired Optimization for Microbial-Assisted Plastic Recycling and Pollution Mitigation in Aquatic Ecosystems (BIO-MAP)

Sabbatical Host: Woods Hole Oceanography Institution

During her sabbatical at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Dr. Chen will focus on pioneering bioinspired strategies for recycling plastics and mitigating microplastic pollution in freshwater and marine ecosystems. Specifically, she will investigate the interactions between microbial systems and plastics, aiming to uncover the mechanisms that drive microbial and enzymatic plastic degradation. By characterizing microbes capable of breaking down plastics, this research will pave the way for the development of biodegradable plastics, addressing a critical gap in sustainable polymer technology. This project will provide a deeper understanding of how polymers degrade in aquatic environments, where plastic pollution poses ecological threats.

Carla Ng – Associate Professor at the University of Pittsburgh

Project Title: Unlocking Safer Alternatives: Top-Down and Bottom-Up Thermodynamics for More Sustainable Molecular Design

Sabbatical Host: University of Toronto

Dr. Ng’s current research is largely focused on per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). Her sabbatical research plan is based on the hypothesis that relationships between thermodynamics and chemical fate can be harnessed to better predict chemical hazard by leveraging innovative “bottom up” and “top down” approaches. She plans to combine proteomic (top town) and exergy-based (bottom-up) thermodynamic analysis of structurally diverse, industrially relevant chemicals to develop new structure-hazard relationships. Dr. Ng will create case studies using problematic chemical classes to compare with success stories in sustainable chemical replacement, to identify opportunities and policy levers to promote faster adoptions of safer chemicals.