Undergraduate & Graduate

Our higher-ed educational resources are crafted to support university students and faculty in implementing and sharing green chemistry in curriculum.

Yale-UNIDO University Curriculum

This course is intended for undergraduates with no prior knowledge of green chemistry and aims to explore how the principles of green chemistry can help resolve global human health and environmental issues. Students will learn to identify different environmental and human health problems, and consider the appropriate solutions using green chemistry tools covered in the course. Upon completion of the course, students will have learned how green chemistry is a fine balance of different concepts and disciplines, including sustainability, chemistry, toxicology, and molecular design.

Safer Chemical Design Game

The game was designed to introduce students to safer chemical design concepts that are focused on the manipulation of molecule parameters in order to minimize the undesired biological and environmental interactions of a hypothetical commercial chemical. The game scenarios model the decision making process used by professionals to design a new chemical. Critically, the computer game simulates the real-world constraints that may affect chemical product development as the student designs a novel product. Players are presented with the challenge of creating a molecule by changing molecular parameters to achieve the optimal result, and while doing so, navigate trade-offs that result from their choices. Each level was divided into three sub-levels, namely, human toxicity, aquatic toxicity and performance, and each has a task that requires completion. 

MoDRN: U Modules

The MoDRN Team (funded by the NSF) has put together a set of modules for undergraduate chemistry, biology, and environmental science classrooms (and beyond!) to introduce concepts of green chemistry and sustainable chemical design. The overall goal of these materials is to engage undergraduate students with educational activities that will aid dissemination of scientific principles relevant to the design of safer, next-generation molecules. Integrating MoDRN:U Modules into existing undergraduate lesson plans will allow students to make more connections with how interdisciplinary these topics truly are.  The following MoDRN:U Modules are free to use and modify. Please return back frequently for new modules to come.

Green Chemistry Videos

The MoDRN Team and Paul Anastas have put together videos to introduce concepts of green chemistry to design and synthesize safer chemicals with less impact. These videos are designed to look at science behind environmental problems and to understand how green chemistry can help to solve them. Students can explore areas where green chemistry was successfully applied and where the lack of green chemistry systems thinking led to unintended consequences. 

Student Videos on Green Chemistry

The Center hosted a student video competition in March 2018 and the winning videos were announced and screened at the 22nd Green Chemistry & Engineering conference in Portland, Oregon. The competition was designed to engage green chemistry community and create opportunity to build educational materials that can be used in university curriculum and in workshops around the world. Students were asked to explain how chemists use green chemistry to solve sustainability challenges. The competition is part of the bigger Yale-UNIDO initiative, which aims to increase the general global awareness and capacities on deployable Green Chemistry approaches for the design of products and processes that advance global environmental benefits throughout their life cycles. The winning videos and honorable mentions are hosted here and can be used for educational purposes.