Biography

A champion of sustainability science, Terry Collins is the Teresa Heinz Professor of Green Chemistry and the Director of the Institute for Green Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Collins invented "TAML® Activators", the first, full-functional, small molecule mimics of any of the great families of oxidizing enzymes. In the process, one of the great challenges of reaction chemistry has been solved—easy deployment of the mimicked efficient catalytic cycles of oxidative metabolism. Today, NewTAMLs are the best performers.

Collins learned of the insidious health damage caused by anthropogenic chemical pollutants in his native New Zealand. He launched his academic career by creating an iterative catalyst design protocol to explore whether biomimetic processes for disinfecting water could be developed to replace chlorine and avoid chlorinated disinfection products. TAML and NewTAML activators are the principal fruits, greatly outperforming the enzymes while enabling applications exhibiting or promising high technical, cost, health, environmental and fairness performances. Collins framed the argument that high health, environmental and fairness performances define sustainable chemicals and need to be integrated with comparable weight to the technical and cost performances that typically define commercial viability.

How does one build strong health, environmental and fairness performances into new chemicals? From what we understand today, the most important strategy consists of gaining precommercial confidence that a new chemical does not elicit low dose or low concentration (for aquatic life) adverse effects (lodafs or locafs) in living things—endocrine disruption is the best understood suite of underlying mechanisms. Endocrine disruptors (EDs) represent major health and environmental threats especially by eliciting developmental effects that permanently impair living things. ED dose-response curves are typically non-monotonic, confounding identification by assays that assume linear dose-responses as are typical of regulatory science.

Until recently, no one knew how to develop such confidence. Collins was a member of a team of 25+ environmental health scientists and green chemists who worked under private funding for 4 years to produce the Tiered Protocol for Endocrine Disruption (TiPED). The living TiPED was published in the journal "Green Chemistry" in January of 2013. It allows EDs to be identified at the highest levels of contemporary science. TAML activators have been subjected to TiPED assays supporting, in ongoing studies, that a key commercially developed TAML is unlikely to be an ED over many examined endpoints.

Of importance to sustainability, TAML activators catalytically activate hydrogen peroxide to eliminate micro-pollutants and pathogens from water with superb technical performances while promising excellent environmental, fairness and cost performances. By mimicking oxidative metabolism, TAML processes rapidly destroy estrogens and many other EDs, active pharmaceutical ingredients, phenols including recalcitrant chloro and nitro-phenols, nitroaromatic explosives, pesticides, chemical warfare agents, and dyes. The hardiest of microbes, bacterial spores, can be simply inactivated with an outstanding 7-log kill in 15-minutes. These discoveries are underpinning new technologies for treating diverse wastewaters and enabling other technologies (e.g. mold cleaning).

TAML activators have been shown in multiple labs to selectively oxidize unactivated C–H bonds. They can be used catalytically or electrocatalytically to oxidize water giving clear-cut cases of water oxidation via the most earth abundant transition metal, iron. Many application areas are being explored and others are likely to be discovered.

For over two decades, Terry Collins has been perfecting what is the first university course in Green Chemistry—today the class is entitled “Chemistry and Sustainability”. He has delivered over 600 public lectures and is an author on over 250 publications, mostly in peer-reviewed journals.

Collins earned his undergraduate and doctoral degrees from the University of Auckland. He joined the Carnegie Mellon faculty in 1987. Among his honors are the 2018 Carnegie Science Center Award for the Environment, the 2010 Heinz Award for the Environment, the inaugural Charles E. Kaufman Award of the Pittsburgh Foundation, the 2007 Award of The New York Metropolitan Catalysis Society, the USEPA’s 1999 Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Award, the Pittsburgh Award from the American Chemical Society, Japan’s Society of Pure and Applied Coordination Chemistry Award, and many others. Collins is a Distinguished Alumni Award recipient from the University of Auckland where he is an Honorary Professor. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand (Hon), the ACS, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and he received a Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award.