UNEA 3 Presidency and Bureau
Dr. Edgar E. Gutiérrez-Espeleta
President of the 2017 UN Environment Assembly
“Our goal, collectively, must be a pollution-free planet.”
Dr. Edgar Gutiérrez is the Minister of Environment and Energy of Costa Rica and the President of the 2017 UN Environment Assembly. He is an advocate and leader of environmental change and has a particular interest in sustainable development and human security.
Dr. Gutiérrez represented his country, Costa Rica, in United Nations agencies and regional ministerial forums. He led the first two status reports of UN Environment on the environment in Latin America and the Caribbean, and the first environmental report in Central America. In addition, he directed the compilation of environmental data for Latin America and the Caribbean. He also led the National Environmental Strategy of Costa Rica in 2005 in cooperation with the Ministry of Environment and Energy.
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Chemistry and computer science join forces to apply artificial intelligence to chemical reactions
In the past few years, researchers have turned increasingly to data science techniques to aid problem-solving in organic synthesis.
Researchers in the lab of Abigail Doyle, Princeton’s A. Barton Hepburn Professor of Chemistry, have developed open-source software that provides them with a state-of-the-art optimization algorithm to use in everyday work, folding what’s been learned in the machine learning field into synthetic chemistry.
Princeton chemists Benjamin Shields and Abigail Doyle worked with computer scientist Ryan Adams (not pictured) to create machine learning software that can optimize reactions – using artificial intelligence to speed through thousands of reactions that chemists used to have to labor through one by one.