Michigan Tech's Sarah Green named Jefferson Science Fellow

By Jennifer Donovan, Michigan Tech Director of Public Relations

Posted March 29, 2013, on Michigan Tech News

HOUGHTON -- Sarah Green, chair of Michigan Tech's Department of Chemistry, has been named a Jefferson Science Fellow by the US Department of State. She will spend a year in Washington, DC, and in countries around the world, working with the State Department or the US Agency for International Development (USAID) on projects to integrate science and public policy.

Sarah Green, chair of Michigan Tech's Department of Chemistry and Jefferson Science Fellow. (Photo courtesy Michigan Technological University. Reprinted with permission.)

"I congratulate Sarah for being nationally recognized as a Jefferson Science Fellow," said Provost Max Seel. "She is eminently qualified and deserving. She has been passionately engaged in advancing science to serve society."

The policy-making experience that the fellowship provides will benefit not only Green, but Michigan Tech as well, Seel went on to say.

"We firmly believe that building strength and expertise of our faculty and students in the public policy area is of strategic importance and needs to become commensurate with our strength in engineering and science," he said.

Bruce Seely, dean of the College of Sciences and Arts, said that Green's "interests in chemistry are easily the most wide-ranging within our Department of Chemistry, ranging from smoking to biodiversity and from biogeochemistry to carbon cycling in the Great Lakes. 

"She is an advocate of green chemical practices and has worked to connect them to the chemistry curriculum," Seely continued. "She easily moves among and between fields and can make complicated scientific information understandable to lay audiences. She is deeply passionate about the environment and about the need to strengthen the presence of underrepresented minorities in science. Sarah lives her values more directly and less dogmatically than anyone I know. She possesses the strong belief that science can make a difference in society." Click here to read the rest of this article on the Michigan Tech News.