Dr. Lauren Heine has joined MaterialWise as Director of Safer Materials & Data Integrity. A pioneering leader in the field of green chemistry, Heine brings decades of experience and leadership in green chemistry and engineering, alternatives assessment and multi-stakeholder collaboration which will accelerate MaterialWise’s efforts to enable a prosperous, toxic-free future for people, the planet and commerce.
Heine is the ideal technical leader to drive MaterialWise’s mission to equip industry leaders who want to do the right thing with reliable access to authoritative material health data. Among her first projects will be spearheading the establishment of a globally harmonized chemical hazard repository containing third-party verified profiles of functional alternatives to toxic chemicals, and establishing an external technical advisory group.
“I am thrilled – and more than a little humbled – to have Lauren join us to realize this ambitious mission,” said Stacy Glass, MaterialWise’s executive director. “Lauren and I have worked together in the material-health ecosystem for more than seven years and I couldn’t be happier to combine our commitment to access, quality and a hazard-based approach to material optimization.”
Heine’s work has been critical to the development of policy and programs globally including work with Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the California Green Ribbon Science Panel, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Design for the Environment Safer Choice and Alternatives Assessment Programs, the Interstate Chemicals Clearinghouse Alternatives Assessment Guide and the Washington Alternatives Assessment Guide. Heine has also developed enduring programs such as such as GreenScreen® for Safer Chemicals and CleanGredients™.
“I am delighted to be joining MaterialWise at such an exciting and important moment for the organization and for green chemistry, Heine said. “The time is right to scale access to actionable information that can drive the use of chemicals to make products that are inherently benign across their lifecycles”
Heine will continue to act as Senior Science Adviser to Northwest Green Chemistry, where she served as executive director beginning in 2015. In that role, she led the organization from its infancy to become a global catalyst for the adoption of safer, more sustainable products and processes. Her positions at both organizations will continue to solidify the teams’ meaningful ongoing collaboration.
About MaterialWise
MaterialWise is a value-chain collaboration to advance better chemistry in the course of product design and manufacturing by providing cost-efficient access to current, verified, actionable chemical hazard data. Services include:
- Creating chemical hazard alternative assessment portfolios for high priority, pre-competitive chemistry in a cost-sharing model to accelerate sector transformation toward safer chemistry.
- Establishing a Globally Harmonized Repository of chemical hazard alternative assessments to house a single third-party verified profile per Chemical Abstracts Service Registry Number enabling a foundation of consistency for chemical hazard alternative-based programs, eliminating redundant work, and lowering the cost for users.
MaterialWise is an independent project of the Healthy Building Network, a 501c(3) based in Washington, DC.
For more information, please visit www.materialwise.org
