Terry Collins, PhD, Inventor & Founder

Committed to do well by doing good.

Terry Collins is the creator-founder of Sudoc and a member of the Board. As the principal inventor of TAML catalysts, he guides the advancement of the technical and cost performances of Sudoc’s chemistry applications. He works side-by-side with Pete Myers and Sudoc’s distinguished panel of endocrine disruption scientists to optimize the health, environmental and fairness performances of the company’s products and processes.

Terry is the Teresa Heinz Professor of Green Chemistry and the Director of the Institute for Green Science at Carnegie Mellon University.  He 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 was solved—the easy deployment of the mimicked efficient catalytic cycles of oxidative metabolism. Today, NewTAMLs, invented by Terry and his team, are the best technically performing homogeneous peroxide activating catalysts across both chemistry and biology.

Terry is a champion of sustainability science. He 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 of those efforts, outperforming the enzymes while enabling applications exhibiting or promising high technical, cost, health, environmental and fairness performances. 

Terry has 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 for chemical products and processes. He advocates that testing should continue post-commercialization. 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.

Terry 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 that commercially developed examples are not EDs toward the many examined endpoints. 

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 200 publications in peer-reviewed journals.

Terry 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. Terry 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 as a young scientist.

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