.png "ACSGCI"){kind=logo}
By Cecilia Smith, Administrative Assistant, ACS Green Chemistry Institute
In the next article in our series spotlighting the 2023 Early Career Postdoctoral-Faculty Bridge Grant (ECP) awardees and the 2023 Principal Investigator Development (PISD) in Sustainability Grant awardees, read about the impact of the ECP grant on the evolution of sustainable materials science research and education, and learn how the PISD grant has fostered international collaboration.
In January 2025, Bryan James started a new faculty position at Northeastern University with a research focus on the use of benign natural products, such as engineered oligonucleotides (e.g., DNA), as more sustainable alternatives to existing plastics additives. His goal is to bring green chemistry principles into material science research to reduce human health and environmental impacts and contribute to U.N. Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for Good Health and Well-Being, Life Below Water, and Life on Land.
James was a recipient of the ACS Green Chemistry Institute’s Early Career Postdoctoral-Faculty Bridge Grant in 2023, which gave him two years of funds to support a post-doctoral associate once he launched his new research group. Thus far, the ECP grant has proved to be an important source of support in James’s early career months that has also fostered his new research group’s team culture. “This award has been instrumental in getting my lab off the ground,” says James. “Having a postdoctoral fellow, Dr. Liat Kugelmass, in the first few months of starting my lab has made all the difference. Besides Liat making significant progress with the project, she has contributed tremendously to my lab group’s culture and training of graduate and undergraduate students.”
“When exploring new materials, the process often moves from development to characterization to evaluation of functional properties, with sustainability thought of only after these steps are achieved,” says Edmond Lam, Assistant Director of the ACS Green Chemistry Institute. “James’s research, however, incorporates the green chemistry principles Designing Safer Chemicals and Less Hazardous Chemical Syntheses into the design stages of the materials development process.”
“Sustainability should be valued as much as any other performance metric. If it’s left to after a material composition and structure are decided on, then making changes becomes costly and time-consuming. My lab is working to develop the tools that scientists and engineers can use early on in that exploration process and in decision making,” says James.
In addition to offering catalytic funding for building a new research group, the ECP grant provides resources and guidance to awardees to teach one undergraduate or graduate course in green chemistry or sustainability. James’s teaching pursuits, like his research, delve into the gap between material science and sustainability.
While developing upcoming course materials, James conducted a preliminary survey of materials selection courses from about 30 different materials science and engineering departments. “I found that few descriptions mentioned environmental impacts in the way they described the course (a proxy measure for course content as syllabi were not readily available) and additionally learned that the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) guidelines for materials science programs is fairly non-descript in what is required for satisfying environmental considerations in design,” says James.
At Northeastern, James is working with the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering to help incorporate green chemistry principles into a materials selection course, with a focus on designing circular, sustainable, and non-persistent plastic products using the materials selection framework taught in the course. From his teaching experience since obtaining the grant, James is writing a manuscript for the special issue Teaching Innovation in Materials Science and Engineering Design in the Journal of Chemical Education, which will focus on including design for degradation in materials selection coursework.
The Principal Investigator Development in Sustainability Grant provides funding to early or mid-career investigators to spend 6-12 months in the laboratory of a private company, a national laboratory, or an academic laboratory in a different institution, with the goal of establishing robust collaborations across industry—academia or across disciplines. Ambarish Kulkarni, professor at University of California, Davis, was a 2023 recipient of this grant for his project, Revolutionizing the Transportation Industry using Liquid Organic Hydrogen Carriers.
The PISD grant brought Kulkarni to the Technical University of Denmark in Copenhagen, where he worked with Professor Ib Chorkendorff to develop a novel scheme for extracting the chemical energy stored in aliphatic C-H bonds via thermo-electrochemical methods. The research unlocks the ability of liquid organic hydrogen carriers (LOHCs) such as cycloalkanes that can be used directly as fuels rather than only as hydrogen storage compounds, which would leverage the existing petroleum infrastructure and allow for these compounds to act as Zero Emission Recyclable Oils (ZEROs). The project is closely aligned with U.N. SDG 7, Affordable and Clean Energy; SDG 9, Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure; SDG 11, Sustainable Communities, and SDG 13, Climate Action.
Over the course of his sabbatical, Kulkarni had the opportunity to meet and collaborate with leading European researchers across catalysis science, materials chemistry, and molecular modeling. In addition to collaborators at the Technical University of Denmark, Kulkarni interfaced with researchers at Ghent University, KU Leuven in Belgium, the Instituto de Tecnología Química in Spain, and the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule in Zürich. “The PISD grant was instrumental because it facilitated in-person interactions and lab visits with several famous and not-so-famous European researchers. The latter interactions are important because their work is impressive but not as well known in the US. This has resulted in several projects focused on predictive synthesis of nanoporous materials for sustainability applications,” says Kulkarni.
In addition to bolstering his scientific partnerships, the grant also helped support a new publication for Kulkarni and collaborators, Low-Temperature Nonoxidative Dehydrogenation of Short-Chain Alkanes over Copper(I) Mordenite via Chemical Looping. (J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2025, 147 (18), 15880–15889. https://doi.org/10.1021/jacs.5c04229)
Reflecting on his sabbatical work, Kulkarni says, “the most profound realization was that the primary bottleneck holding back the deployment of next-generation green technologies is not theory or computational design—it’s synthesis. While we can now use modeling to predict ideal catalysts, we still lack the ability to reliably translate those predictions into real materials in the lab.”
In addition to Kulkarni’s significant research progress during his time at the Technical University of Denmark, he has significantly broadened UC Davis’s commitment to sustainability and green chemistry education within the chemical engineering department. Kulkarni has developed and implemented a new 5-week module on Liquid Organic Hydrogen Carriers and Direct Air Capture in the core sophomore-level thermodynamics course, which introduces students to hydrogen storage and carbon capture technologies as a real-world manifestation of core thermodynamic concepts.
“In particular, I strive to connect the ‘theory’ of thermodynamics to the design of green energy systems in a way that is both scientifically rigorous and deeply relevant to student interests,” says Kulkarni. With this methodology, Kulkarni has received positive responses from his students and strong student engagement. “The PISD-supported sabbatical gave me the space needed to update the undergraduate thermodynamics and graduate kinetics curriculum,” says Kulkarni, and has sparked student interest in research related to sustainable energy and chemical transformation technologies.