HOW TO ENHANCE SUSTAINABILITY AND INNOVATION IN THE COMPETENCES OF THE DEGREE/MASTER IN CHEMISTRY

The curricula defined by the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Burgos for the Degree in Chemistry [1] and for the Master's Degree in Advanced Chemistry established a competence framework that incorporates the concepts of sustainability and innovation. A Chemistry graduate, during his training, should be aware that reducing the number of laboratory experiments and minimizing costs is an unavoidable obligation to comply with the three dimensions of the triangle of sustainability: i) economic viability, i) environmental responsibility, iii) social responsibility. For several years, our graduate and postgraduate students are learning these competences by dealing with the methodology of experimental design (topic that appears in several stages of the training process). The present work shows how students solve different cases of basic and applied investigation, so that the aforementioned competences and skills are naturally acquired. In particular, three case-studies are shown [2,3,4] usually introduced in the degree, master degree and PhD stages to use D-optimal designs and multicriteria optimization with the aim of reducing the economic and environmental costs of the analysis without losing reliability. In that way, the future chemists can solve complex problems by considering not only the efficiency of the used methods but also the economic, environmental and social viability, that is, they are able to more efficiently manage the scientific knowledge assuming their role as potential innovators, because nowadays the innovation is not an option but an obligation.