Students Find a Green Solution
Simmons does more than just talk the talk about greening its campus; the community also walks the walk. Assistant Professor Rich Gurney of the Simmons Chemistry department has been instrumental in bringing "green chemistry" to campus over the last four years, and his students have taken his crusade to both the national and international arenas.
For several years now, Gurney has been working with his students on the "Cups to Cleaners: Trash to Treasure" project. Under his tutelage, Jennifer Boice, a 2008 graduate, developed a method for converting biodegradable plastic cups used in the Fens dining area into a "green" cleaner able to remove lime scale and soap scum in the College's bathrooms. The project grew to include more than 12 undergraduate researchers in the chemistry department.
"Being a part of this project was such a great experience," Boice said. "Not only was I able to learn more about organic chemistry, but I also learned the implications of our actions as a society from the green chemistry standpoint. The project motivated many of us to discover a solution for making our campus more 'green.'"
According to Gurney, the students drive the "Cups to Cleaners" project, and several of them were invited to present their work at professional association conferences, including the American Chemical Society's annual meeting and the Materials Research Society's international conference. "This is something I haven't even been asked to do!" laughed Gurney.
The Cups to Cleaners project has sparked collaboration with a professor in Argentina, Dr. Debora Martino at the Instituto de Desarrollo Tecnologico para la Industria Quimica at the Universidad Nacional Litoral in Santa Fe, Argentina. She has invited three Simmons undergraduates to work on the synthesis, characterization, and modeling of a new "green" polymer this summer in Argentina. The students are scheduled to bring their research back to Simmons to continue it during the 2008-09 academic year.
Here in the United States, Professor Gurney was one of 10 educators nationwide invited last summer and granted a stipend to fund his participation at a "Green Chemistry in Education" workshop in Washington, D.C. While there, Gurney also attended the International Green Chemistry and Engineering Conference, where he presented two papers that highlighted the strong contributions of Simmons students in both the research and teaching labs on campus over the last four years. His contributions to the field are summarized in the book State-of-the-Art Green Chemistry Education, published in January 2008 by the American Chemical Society.
Explore the Chemistry department
posted: August 6, 2009
