Prize Created For ACS Scholars Mentors

Robert L. Lichter, principal at Merrimack Consultants, has created a new prize to recognize mentors of the ACS Scholars Program, which is celebrating its 15th anniversary this year. The prize will be seeded with the $10,000 grant that Lichter received as part of the 2010 ACS Award for Encouraging Disadvantaged Students into Careers in the Chemical Sciences, sponsored by the Camille & Henry Dreyfus Foundation.

The Zaida Morales-Martínez Prize for Outstanding Mentoring of ACS Scholars will be a $1,000 cash prize given annually, starting in 2011. “It’s important to have this kind of award because mentoring is such a key part of this program,” says Robert J. Hughes, manager of the ACS Scholars Program. “It’s really time that we started to add something like this to the system.”

The ACS Scholars Program provides scholarships for undergraduate African American, Hispanic, and American Indian students pursuing a college degree in the chemical sciences or chemical technology. Each scholar is paired with a mentor.

Lichter announced the new award last month, during his award address at the ACS national meeting in Boston. “This is an opportunity to honor someone who has devoted so much of her life to the mentoring of students, and that is, without question, Zaida,” Lichter tells C&EN. “Naming it for Zaida highlights the profound role she has played as a mentor, both directly and indirectly, in affecting and probably even changing the lives of countless students.”

Morales-Martínez, an emeritus professor of chemistry at Florida International University and longtime ACS Scholars mentor and coordinator, says she was “completely blown away” by the surprise announcement. “I started crying, shaking,” she says. “My son, his wife, and my grandson also attended the award address, and they, too, started crying.”

Morales-Martínez says that Lichter’s creation of this award reflects his commitment to encouraging disadvantaged students to succeed in the chemical sciences. “He really understands diversity,” she says. “He has done so much for the ACS Scholars Program.”

Lichter “has been a tireless supporter of this program in so many ways,” Hughes says. “This is just another way that he chooses to help it and to move it along.”

Lichter and his wife, Diane Scott-Lichter, will initially make annual donations to the prize, so that it can be awarded beginning next year. “In the meantime, we hope others will contribute to the fund to bring it to at least $50,000 so that it can begin to generate interest and eventually become self-funding,” Lichter says.