Rigoberto Hernandez has been elected the 2025 American Chemical Society president-elect by ACS members. Hernandez will serve as society president in 2026 and immediate past president in 2027. These roles include serving on the board of directors from 2025 to 2027.
“This is awesome,” Hernandez, a professor of chemistry and biomolecular engineering at Johns Hopkins University, says. “I had a platform: ACS first, ACS for all, ACS for life. And I’m really excited about pursuing those three areas.” Hernandez says the three areas he chose to focus on in his campaign align with the ACS mission and vision as well as “with the fact that ACS should be the first place that everyone comes to when they want to know about chemistry and when they want to know how chemistry can help them solve problems and how chemistry is part of the solution.”
Hernandez says that once you’re a chemist, you’ve learned to solve problems in a very thorough process that’s unique to scientists. “That puts you in a position that whatever problem you’re addressing or solving—whether it’s in the public sector, private sector, industry, in a government, no matter which government that is—you’re helping the world be a better place.” He says that even if you’re not practicing chemistry every day or in a lab anymore, you’re still a chemist, “and the ACS is a home for you.”
“I want to make sure that I can help chemists stay engaged, be chemists for life, no matter what they do,” Hernandez says. “Because that will help all of our members be better chemists.”
Hernandez has been an ACS member for 32 years. He remembers almost immediately being asked to run for chair of what was at the time his 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 other committees and was eventually elected to the Committee on Committees, which “is the best committee of all,” Hernandez says.
“If you’re on the Committee on Committees, your job is to identify what volunteer activity best suits other members,” he says. “So for me, I got to meet my colleagues and got to find out what they wanted and promote their aspirations. So truly, a professional society is one that promotes each other.” From there, Hernandez served on the ACS Board of Directors representing District IV. He then moved from Atlanta to teach at Johns Hopkins University, serving on that local section. “And now I have an opportunity to serve and learn and maybe promote chemistry as president, and I, I relish that,” he says.
As far as looking to the future, Hernandez asks a question when thinking about one of his biggest challenges: “Will they [our ACS members] still value the professional society in the way that we saw it 100 years ago?
“And the answer is 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.”