Dr. Alexey Leontyev is an Associate Professor at North Dakota State University. He earned his Ph.D. in Chemical Education from the University of Northern Colorado in 2015 and previously served as an Assistant Professor at Adams State University before joining NDSU in 2018. His chemistry education research develops and validates assessment tools to measure students’ green chemistry knowledge and sustainability-related affect, while also evaluating instructional innovations. He is a recipient of the 2023 ACS CEI Award for Incorporation of Sustainability into Chemistry Education and the 2025 NSF CAREER award.

• https://www.ndsu.edu/people/alexey-leontyev

Plenary Lecture: Green Chemistry in the Classroom: Measuring What Students Know and Building the Community of Practice

Green chemistry is increasingly treated as a core expectation in chemistry programs, including student familiarity with the Twelve Principles of Green chemistry and the ability to evaluate chemical products and processes through environmental, health, and societal lenses. Yet in higher education, green chemistry often appears as “add-on” content rather than a throughline.

This talk highlights why assessment and community infrastructure are the essential pieces for scaling green chemistry education. I will summarize research on what green and sustainable chemistry concepts are currently taught in organic chemistry and what factors influence whether instructors integrate these topics into both curriculum and assessment. I will then introduce a set of complementary assessment tools: a rapid, scalable instrument for screening student knowledge of green chemistry principles along with open-ended and case-comparison prompts designed to reveal how students reason.

Finally, I will share how a “by the community, for the community” resource model including a virtual platform and a community-written assessments can help educators adopt evidence-based materials, compare interventions, and better support student learning in green chemistry.