Rigoberto Hernandez, a professor of chemistry at Johns Hopkins University, has been elected the 2025 president-elect of the American Chemical Society (ACS), one of the world's largest scientific societies.
Image caption: Rigoberto Hernandez
"This is awesome," Hernandez told Chemical & Engineering News. "I had a platform: ACS first, ACS for all, ACS for life. ... ACS should be the first place that everyone comes to when they want to know about chemistry."
Hernandez will serve as president-elect in 2025, society president in 2026, and immediate past president in 2027. These roles include serving on the board of directors from 2025 to 2027.
ACS has grown to over 155,000 members since its founding in 1876. Once president, Hernandez hopes to maintain the society's legacy and increase its value for modern chemists.
"The way this professional society is today is different than the way the professional society was 100 years ago," Hernandez says. "And yet we're still serving our members. And so what that means, what the history tells us, is that we have to adjust to the way that a professional society serves its members, not because we want change but because we want to be the society that our members need. And that's scary because it means that it may be a little bit different tomorrow, but it will be better because we'll still be serving our members."
Hernandez has been an ACS member for 32 years. After joining, he remembers being asked almost immediately to run for chair of his then-local section in Georgia.
"I saw that as an opportunity to engage members more broadly in a way that was different from the students that I saw in my classroom," he says.
From there he joined various committees, eventually moving up to the ACS Board of Directors before being elected president-elect.
"Now I have an opportunity to serve and learn and maybe promote chemistry as president, and I relish that."
Posted in Science+Technology, University News
Tagged chemistry
