Green skipped both kindergarten and 4th grade and graduated from Archmere Academy, a private Catholic high school in Delaware, shortly after his 16th birthday.

For his undergraduate thesis research he built a molecular beam instrument under the direction of Carol Cuzens Kahler and used it to measure the effect of rotational energy on the rate of the reaction NO + ozone, his first journal publication.

Green received an National Science Foundation fellowship to attend graduate school in physical chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley.

The latter experiments were the first to very clearly demonstrate that the energy-resolved relative rates of formation of different product channels are quantized, as predicted by RRKM theory.

This work attracted press attention,[4] was the subject of an article in Annual Review of Physical Chemistry[5] and is discussed in textbooks on unimolecular reaction rates.

[7] After earning his Ph.D. in 1988, Green received fellowships from the National Science Foundation, NATO, and Darwin College to do postdoctoral research in theoretical chemistry at Cambridge University with Nicholas C. Handy.

During that time he developed first-principles methods for calculating molecular spectra, working on the program SPECTRO with Andrew Willets and on the Renner-Teller molecule singlet methylene with Stuart Carter and Peter Knowles.

In early 1991 he did postdoctoral work with Marsha I. Lester at the University of Pennsylvania, developing a framework for interpreting the spectra of van der Waals complexes of free radicals.

His group also constructed a unique instrument combining flash photolysis, vacuum ultraviolet photoionization mass spectrometry, and long-path laser absorption, making it possible to measure both rates and product branching ratios simultaneously, in order to test calculations on individual reactions.

Green also held leading roles in several research projects of MIT's Energy Initiative, including the Mobility of the Future Study.

[17] Very recently, Green has developed ways for using machine learning to predict the properties of molecules and the major products of chemical reactions.

While Green is best known for his research, he won the Mohr Award for Outstanding Teaching of Undergraduates as well, and he served as Executive Officer of the MIT Chemical Engineering Department 2012–2015.