First Do No Harm

Paul T. Anastas is the Teresa and H. John Heinz III Professor in the practice of chemistry for the environment. He has appointments in the School of the Environment, School of Public Health, Department of Chemistry, and Department of Chemical Engineering at Yale University, Connecticut, USA. In addition, Prof. Anastas serves as the director of the Center for Green Chemistry and Green Engineering at Yale. He took public service leave from Yale to serve as the assistant administrator for the US Environmental Protection Agency and the Agency Science Advisor during 2009–2012. From 2004  to 2006, he served as Director of the ACS Green Chemistry Institute in Washington, DC. He was previously the assistant director for the environment in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, where he worked from 1999 to 2004. He is credited with establishing the field of green chemistry during his time working for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as the chief of the Industrial Chemistry Branch and as the director of the U.S. Green Chemistry Program. In 2021, he was awarded the Volvo Environment Prize for pioneering work in developing non-hazardous chemicals.

Predrag V. Petrovic is an associate research scientist at the Yale School of the Environment, Yale University, Connecticut, USA. He obtained a joint PhD in organometallic chemistry at the University of Belgrade, Serbia, and the University of Strasbourg, France, in 2014 where he applied experimental and theoretical approaches in studying non-covalent interactions in organometallic complexes. In 2017, he joined the Center for Green Chemistry and Green Engineering at Yale where his main research focus is setting a foundation for the methodology that will help safer chemical design that complies with the 12 principles of green chemistry by using various computational tools.