Comment by the President-Elect

I remain honored and grateful that Council and our Membership elected me to be your President-Elect in 2025. I am excited to work together with you—Committee Chairs and Councilors from Local Sections,  Divisions, and, soon, Zones—to advance ACS’s mission and vision on behalf of our members and all chemists.

To stay current with our members, we need to meet them where they are, and where they would like to be. My platform items, ACS First, ACS for Life and ACS for All, set a course for directions along which change is needed. How we implement these changes will depend on how you and our members, working through our existing governance structures, shape it. 

ACS First: I would like to ensure that our strategic planning and our communications align with the objective that we should be the first place our members and the public turn to when they need an answer to a chemistry question. 

ACS for Life: Our membership committees are already exploring new membership categories, and I believe that a life membership category will provide assurance to all of our members that once they are a chemist, they are always a chemist. I also look forward to identifying other ways that help members feel more engaged with chemistry and the ACS for all their lives. Let’s think about ACS for Life as broadly as possible as we work together to enhance community engagement.

ACS for All: The ACS has already charted a path towards increasing diversity and inclusion. I hope to broaden and catalyze that directive during my tenure by promoting a diversity culture and championing belonging within that culture. It’s a win-win when a new member joins. They get access to all of us, and what we can do together. We get access to the perspectives and talents that they add to us, and what we can do together. That is why we must be open to and welcome all who self-identify as chemists.

These planks may seem incremental because they can be enacted through policy changes within our current governance structures. They are also paradigm shifting, however, because they set a course for a society that will welcome more chemists with increasingly varied experiences to help us learn and grow with an emphasis on in-person experiences at scale. I look forward to hearing from you about how we can best advance these initiatives. I’m also open to other ideas and directions. Please reach out to me at ACS meetings or e-mail me at acs-hernandez@jh.edu.