Dr. Jacqueline Bennett, associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry at SUNY Oneonta, has been selected as a recipient of the 2011 Award for Incorporating Sustainability into Chemistry Education presented by the American Chemical Society’s Committee on Environmental Improvement. She was recognized for her work on developing a “green” imine synthesis as an authentic research experience for students in organic chemistry.
Bennett will receive the award and present an invited talk about her work at the American Chemical Society’s 2011 spring national meeting later this month in Anaheim, California.
Working with her student-research group, Bennett discovered a “green” method for synthesizing imines, which are chemical compounds used as pharmaceuticals, corrosion inhibitors, additives to accelerate environmental degradation of plastics, and many other products. In January 2010, she worked with the Technology Transfer Office at the Research Foundation of SUNY to file a provisional patent application for her environmentally friendly method of preparing imines.
Since then, she and her students have continued to explore potential new uses for imines and to develop cost comparisons between the new greener method of synthesis and traditional methods.
Bennett, who joined the SUNY Oneonta faculty in 2006, holds a doctorate in chemistry from the University of California, Riverside. In 2008, she received a grant from the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation’s Special Grant Program in the Chemical Sciences for a project to develop and implement green photochemistry experiments to use in labs in the college’s organic chemistry courses. In 2009, she served as principal investigator for a grant of $164,753 from the National Science Foundation to support the introduction of computational chemistry to the college’s chemistry curriculum through a graduated approach. In 2010, she received the Richard Siegfried Junior Faculty Prize for Academic Excellence from SUNY Oneonta.