ACS Green Chemistry Institute Advisory Board
The ACS GCI Advisory Board is comprised of members from non-profit organizations, industry, and academia to reflect a broad set of environmental interests and capabilities. The board convenes biannually and assists the Institute in accomplishing its strategic goals.
Advisory Board Members
Dr. David K. Leahy
GCI Advisory Board Chair
Vice President, Drug Substance Development
Biohaven
Dr. David K. Leahy is a Vice President, Drug Substance Development with Biohaven. He has 20 years of pharmaceutical process chemistry experience, with expertise in drug substance manufacturing, catalysis and green chemistry. Prior to joining Biohaven he had roles of increasing scope from Takeda Pharmaceuticals and Bristol-Myers Squibb. He has contributed to multiple commercial drug substance programs, built capabilities in process chemistry automation, biocatalysis, and green micellar chemistry. His work in micellar chemistry resulted in one of the industry’s first manufacturing processes of a complex API almost exclusively in water instead of organic solvents. He also led multiple academic collaborations to solve complex chemistry challenges leading to advances in catalytic asymmetric nucleotide couplings, as well as nanocatalysis in aqueous micelles. Dr. Leahy also has extensive experience in green chemistry and sustainability, having served as a co-chair of the ACS Green Chemistry Institute Pharmaceutical Roundtable and program chair and advisory board member of the ACS Green Chemistry and Engineering Conference. He completed his Ph.D. in organic chemistry from Indiana University.
Dr. Emma Lavoie
Senior Science Advisor, Center for Public Health and Environmental Assessment
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
Emma Lavoie is a Senior Science Advisor in the Office of Research and Development at the Environmental Protection Agency. She has worked across hazard, risk, and alternatives assessment disciplines in both human health and ecological issues in several positions at the Environmental Protection Agency. During her time with the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention she was instrumental in developing the Design for Environment/Safer Choice Criteria for Safer Chemicals, expanding the Safer Chemical Ingredient List, and leading a number of Alternatives Assessments. Her career yields interactional expertise in a variety of biology, chemistry and toxicology disciplines and methods, and their application in policy and sustainability. She has degrees in biological and biomedical sciences from Wright State University.
Dr. Steven Moss
Committee on Environment and Sustainability Chair
Senior Policy Advisor
National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology
Steven Moss is a Senior Policy Advisor for the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology (NSCEB) where he focuses on policy around the convergence of emerging areas of science and technology with biotechnology. Prior to joining NSCEB, Steven was a Senior Program Officer at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM). At NASEM he worked on their Board on Life Sciences, focused on a portfolio of projects related to advancing the bioeconomy and the future of biotechnology. Steven comes from a laboratory background, having spent 10 years in chemistry and biology laboratory settings. Much of his lab work focused on understanding the molecular mechanisms of disease with projects on infectious bacteria, cancer, and chronic pain. Steven also serves as the Chair of the American Chemical Society’s Committee on Environment and Sustainability, a member of the Biophysical Society’s Public Affairs Committee, and a judge for the international Genetically Engineering Machine (iGEM) competition. Steven holds a Ph.D. in Chemistry and Chemical Biology from the University of California, San Francisco, and a B.S. in Biochemistry from American University.
Dr. Carolyn Ribes
Business Analytical Leader
Dow Chemical
Carolyn Ribes is the Business Analytical Leader for Industrial Intermediates & Infrastructure at Dow Chemical. She received her B.S. in Chemistry in 1983 from University at Buffalo, SUNY, and her Ph.D. in Chemistry in 1989 from State University of New York at Buffalo. She joined Dow in 1989 and has worked in Louisiana, Texas, and Argentina and is currently located in Terneuzen, Netherlands. She has been a member of the American Chemical Society since 1982.
Dr. Bala Subramaniam
Dan F. Servey Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering
University of Kansas
Founding Director
Center for Environmentally Beneficial Catalysis (CEBC)
Bala Subramaniam is the Dan F. Servey Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Kansas (KU) and Founding Director of the Center for Environmentally Beneficial Catalysis (CEBC), initiated in 2003 as a National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center. Subramaniam earned a B. Tech. degree from the University of Madras (A. C. College of Technology), India, and his Master’s/Ph. D. degrees from the University of Notre Dame (USA), all in chemical engineering. Subramaniam’s research interests are in promoting decarbonization and sustainability in the chemical industry through catalysis and reactor engineering. He has authored 280+ publications, one textbook and 36 issued patents. He has presented ~200 invited talks at universities, companies and conferences. Subramaniam has directed the research of 85+ graduate and postdoctoral researchers, with many enjoying successful careers in industry and academia. Subramaniam is a co-founder of CritiTech, a pharmaceutical company commercializing the production and application of fine-particle compounds. He is currently Executive Editor of the ACS Sustainable Chemistry and Engineering journal. Subramaniam has chaired several international conferences including the 18th International Symposium on Chemical Reaction Engineering (ISCRE), a Joint India-U.S. Chemical Engineering Conference on Energy and Sustainability (2013) and the 2018 Gordon Research Conference on Green Chemistry. Subramaniam is a Fellow of the AAAS, AIChE and the National Academy of Inventors.
Dr. Adelina Voutchkova-Kostal
Ex Officio
Director, Office of Sustainability
American Chemical Society
Adelina Voutchkova is the Director of Sustainable Development at the American Chemical Society and leads the ACS Green Chemistry Institute. Adelina joined the ACS from George Washington University where her research program spans the two frontiers of green chemistry: the development of green synthetic methods through supported catalysis, and the development of predictive methods for identifying chemicals of toxicological concern. She is the recipient of the NSF CAREER award, the 2020 Early Career Researcher Award from GWU, and the 2021 Thieme Chemistry Journals Award, among others. Adelina was previously a Research Associate and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Yale Center for Green Chemistry and Green Engineering. She completed her Ph.D. in organometallic chemistry at Yale with Bob Crabtree, focusing on atom-economical catalytic transformations facilitated by NHC complexes. She earned her BA from Middlebury College, where she worked with Prof. Sunhee Choi on the chemistry of Pt anticancer complexes.
Dr. John C. Warner
President & CEO
Technology Greenhouse, LLC
John Warner is one of the founders of the field of green chemistry. He wrote the book that provides the definition and 12 principles of green chemistry with Paul Anastas in 1998.
He received his B.Sc. from UMASS Boston and his Ph.D. from Princeton University. As an industrial chemist, he has over 350 patents and has worked with hundreds of companies worldwide and serves on the sustainability advisory boards of several multinational companies. He received the Perkin Medal in 2014 from The Society of Industrial Chemistry.
As an academic, he was a tenured full professor of chemistry and a tenured full professor of plastics engineering at the University of Massachusetts, where he started the world’s first Ph.D. program in Green Chemistry. He has over 120 publications in synthetic methodologies, noncovalent derivatization, polymer photochemistry and metal oxide semiconductors. In 2004 he received the Presidential Award for excellence in science mentoring (PAESMEM) from the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and President George W. Bush and in 2022 he received the August Wilhelm von Hofmann Medal from the German Chemical Society.
As an entrepreneur, John’s inventions have led to the founding of many companies in the fields of photovoltaics, neurochemistry, construction materials, water harvesting and cosmetics. In 2016 he received the Lemelson Invention Ambassadorship from the Lemelson Foundation and the American Association for the Advancement of the Sciences (AAAS).
John was named one of “25 Visionaries Changing the World” by Utne Reader, and “One of the Most Influential People in the Chemical Industries” by ICI – Sciences. John is a member of the Club of Rome, and holds academic appointments at Monash University in Australia, Chulalongkorn University in Thailand, Somaiya University in India, University of Birmingham in the UK, Rochester Institute of Technology in the US, and Technical University of Berlin in Germany where they have named the “John Warner Center for Start Ups in Green Chemistry.” John currently serves as President and CEO of The Technology Greenhouse.
Jeffrey Whitford
Vice President, Sustainability & Social Business Innovation
MilliporeSigma
As Vice President of Sustainability & Social Business Innovation at Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany, which operates as MilliporeSigma in the U.S. and Canada, he serves as a strategic partner to the Life Science Business to accelerate, embed, and amplify sustainability principles and impact across its business operations to drive new business models, margin expansion and cost savings. This is all with one goal in mind: reducing the business’ impact on the environment and enabling customers to make more sustainable choices.
By applying design thinking to sustainability, Whitford starts with sustainability at the outset of product ideation and carries it through the entire product lifecycle. Industry-disrupting firsts launched under his leadership include the award-winning DOZN™ tool for quantifying the ‘greenness’ of a chemical product, a unique Biopharma Recycling Program for single-use and disposable plastics, and a new line of award-winning bio-based alternative solvents (Cyrene™).
Whitford was included in Fast Company’s 2020 list of the Most Creative People in Business. Whitford earned his bachelor’s in journalism and strategic communications from the University of Missouri-Columbia, and his master’s in business administration at Washington University in St. Louis.
ACS GCI's Green Chemistry and Engineering Conference
The 2025 Green Chemistry & Engineering Conference will be held June 23-26 in Pittsburgh, PA, with the theme Good Health & Well-Being Through Sustainable Chemistry.
