Abolhasani, Anastasaki, and Chen: 2025 Winners of the ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering Lectureship Award

Abstract

I am sure that many of us, when we look back, will remember 2025 as a period of tremendous change be that on a geo-political level or indeed within institutions and organizations that are very much closer to home. As the world around us changes and adjusts to the “new normal” of today, we can rest assured that commitment, vibrancy, and above all else a thirst for new insight lives long within the global scientific community. It is with this reassuring familiarity that I have the great pleasure in sharing with you all the winners of this year’s ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering Lectureship Awards. These lectureship awards recognize leading contributions of scientists and engineers active in the general fields of green chemistry, green engineering, and sustainability in the broadest sense of the chemical enterprise and are awarded each year in collaboration with the ACS Green Chemistry Institute. The ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering Lectureship awards were created to celebrate early-to-mid-career investigators who completed academic training no more than 10 years prior to nomination. In support of our commitment to nurture and stimulate a global community of outstanding practice, we award three Lectureship Awards to recognize outstanding levels of contribution from The Americas, Europe/Middle East/Africa, and Asia/Pacific. The winners of the 2025 ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering Lectureship Awards are as follows: Professor Milad Abolhasani of North Carolina State University (Raleigh, NC), honored for his pioneering work on “Self-Driving Laboratories”─integrating flow reactors, online reaction monitoring, and autonomous experimentation (1−3) Professor Athina Anastasaki of ETH Zürich (Zürich, Switzerland), honored for her pioneering contributions demonstrating low-temperature radical depolymerization of vinyl polymers (4−6) Professor Hong Chen of Southern University of Science and Technology (Shenzhen, China), honored for his innovative application of clean technologies, notably electrochemical- and photochemical-driven processes to address pollution control and circular processing of technical materials (7−9) Our awardees will be honored at the 29th Annual Green Chemistry & Engineering Conference in Pittsburgh (June 23–26, 2025). We warmly invite the readership of ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering to join us and celebrate these achievements in Pittsburgh this June. In closing, we thank the global community of scientists and engineers devoted to sustainable chemistry and engineering for their active response to this year’s call for nominations. We are thrilled to report that the nominations received, spanning all regions, continue to grow and are truly reflective of a multidisciplinary community that continues to strive to deliver the objectives of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Details of the next award cycle will be available in Fall 2025 or by sending inquiries to Award.ACSSustainable@acs.org. This article references 9 other publications. This article has not yet been cited by other publications.