Marie Anne Paulze Lavoisier led a remarkable life – from a privileged family, marrying Antoine Laurent Lavoisier at age 13, studying chemistry, English, art to help her husband, participating in his work, drawing the plates for his most important treatise, engraving them, losing her husband and father in one day to Jacobin terror, marrying (in a disastrous marriage) Count Rumford, another scientist, living on into the Empire. In the process of telling her story, we will learn a bit about France at the time of the Revolution, and of M. Lavoisier’s work on the foundations of modern chemistry. Mme. Lavoisier’s accomplishments as an artist are traced through her work and letters in the Cornell University Libraries. Was she a chemist?

About Roald Hoffmann:

Roald Hoffmann was born in 1937 in Złoczów, Poland. Having survived World War II, he came to the U. S. in 1949, and studied chemistry at Columbia and Harvard Universities (Ph.D. 1962).  Since 1965 he is at Cornell University, now as the Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters, Emeritus.  He has received many of the honors of his profession, including the 1981 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (shared with Kenichi Fukui).

At Cornell, Hoffmann taught introductory chemistry half of his time. Notable also  is his reaching out to the general public; he was the presenter, for example, of a television course in chemistry titled "The World of Chemistry," shown widely since 1990.

As a writer, Hoffmann has carved out a land between science, poetry, and philosophy, through many essays, five non-fiction books,  three plays and seven  published collection of poetry, including  bilingual Spanish-English and Russian-English editions published in Madrid, Orihuela, and Moscow. 

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Imagine a world where all segments of society demanded environmentally benign climate neutral products! Imagine if all consumers, all retailers and all manufacturers insisted on buying and selling only non-toxic truly sustainable materials! The unfortunate reality is that, even if this situation were to occur, our knowledge of materials science and chemistry would allow us to provide only a small fraction of the necessary products and materials that our economy is based upon. Unfortunately, the way we learn and teach chemistry and materials science in academia is for the most part void of any information regarding mechanisms of toxicity and environmental harm. Green Chemistry is a science that seeks to reduce or eliminate the use of hazardous materials at the design stage of a materials process. It has been demonstrated that materials and products CAN be designed with negligible impact on human health and the environment while still being economically competitive and successful in the marketplace. This presentation will describe the history and background of Green Chemistry and discuss the opportunities for the next generation of materials designers to create a safer and more sustainable future.

About Dr. John Warner:  

John Warner is one of the founders of the field of green chemistry. He wrote the book that provides the definition and 12 principles of green chemistry with Paul Anastas in 1998. As an industrial chemist, he has over 350 patents and has worked with hundreds of companies worldwide. He received the Perkin Medal in 2014 from The Society of Industrial Chemistry. As an academic, he was a tenured full professor of chemistry and a tenured full professor of plastics engineering at the University of Massachusetts where he started the world’s first PhD program in Green Chemistry. He has over 120 publications in synthetic methodologies, noncovalent derivatization, polymer photochemistry, metal oxide semiconductors and green chemistry. In 2004 he received the Presidential Award for excellence in science mentoring (PAESMEM) from the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and President George W Bush and in 2022 he received the August Wilhelm von Hofmann Medal from the German Chemical Society. As an inventor, John’s inventions have led to the founding of many companies in the fields of photovoltaics, neurochemistry, construction materials, water harvesting and cosmetics. In 2016 he received the Lemelson Invention Ambassadorship from the Lemelson Foundation and the American Association for the Advancement of the Sciences (AAAS). John is a member of the Club of Rome, and holds academic appointments at Monash University in Australia, Chulalongkorn University in Thailand, Somaiya University in India, University of Birmingham in the UK, Rochester Institute of Technology in the US, and Technical University of Berlin in Germany where they have named the “John Warner Center for Start Ups in Green Chemistry.” John currently serves as President and CEO of The Technology Greenhouse.