Mark M. Green, who was born April 6, 1937 and raised in New York City, attended the City College of New York, and received his doctoral degree from Princeton University in 1966 working with Kurt Mislow and supported by a National Institutes of Health Predoctoral Fellowship. After a postdoctoral year with Carl Djerassi at Stanford University supported by a National Institutes of Health Postdoctoral Fellowship, Professor Green entered the academic world and spent thirteen years in positions at the University of Michigan, Michigan State University, and Clarkson College of Technology. During this time he became known internationally for his work on the chemistry of the gas phase ions encountered in mass spectrometers, which was continuously supported by the General Medical Sciences Program of the National Institutes of Health and to some extent by the Petroleum Research Fund administered by the American Chemical Society. He was attracted to use stereochemical methods to explore a system in which precise kinetic measurements could be made under conditions where there was no intermolecular exchange of energy and therefore an impossible to define temperature. During the 1971-1972 academic year he was a visiting professor at the Istituto de Quimica d’Sarria in Barcelona, Spain and at the Technion Institute in Haifa, Israel. In 1978 he was an Indo-American Scholar under the Fulbright Program and spent six months in India at Jadavpur University in Calcutta and at the National Research Laboratory in Poona.

In 1980 Professor Green moved to Brooklyn NYU-Poly (now the Polytechnic Institute of NYU) and shortly thereafter, influenced by Herman Mark and Herbert Morawetz, he began to explore stereochemical ideas in polymers. In what became chiral studies of the cooperative nature of polymers he found unexpected phenomena, which has attracted wide attention and influenced other researchers to follow the same path. His research efforts in the polymer area have been continuously supported by the Chemistry and Polymer Divisions of the National Science Foundation, from whom he has won a Special Creativity Award in 1995. This work has also been supported by the Petroleum Research Fund and the Office of Naval Research. In 1991 he won an American Cyanamid Faculty Research Award and in 1995 a Sigma Xi Distinguished Research Award. In 1990 he received a Japan-US Fellowship from the National Science Foundation and spent a sabbatical year as visiting professor at Osaka University.

He has been an invited speaker at many scientific meetings, including plenary lectures, and at various universities all over the world and was elected as chair of the Polymer Chemistry Gordon Conference for the year 2000. He also served for three years on the editorial board of the American Chemical Society journal, Macromolecules and he serves on the editorial board of Topics in Stereochemistry. He has organized two international symposia within the last ten years in the area of the stereochemistry of polymers under the organic and polymer divisions of the American Chemical Society and was elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for “pioneering work in important new areas of polymer science.” Polytechnic Institute of NYU has recognized Professor Green’s achievements with his appointment as one of the senior fellows of the Othmer Institute. He was elected as a Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science for a visit to Japan in 2003 and has been elected as winner of the Society of Polymer Science of Japan award for “Outstanding Achievement in Polymer Science and Technology” for 2005. Professor Green has also been awarded a Jacobs’ Excellence in Teaching Award by the Polytechnic Institute of NYU in 2006 for his innovative “backwards” approach to learning organic chemistry and for his textbook with Harold Wittcoff entitled, “Organic Chemistry Principles and Industrial Practice,” which has received excellent reviews in the chemical and educational literature and has recently been reprinted by the publisher.