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As a child, Dorothy J. Phillips dreamed of becoming a president. She intended to major in history, become a lawyer, and then be elected president of the US. “For my era, this was something that was not achievable,” she says. Now she is partly realizing her dream as president of the American Chemical Society. Her interest in chemistry was sparked in high school by a 6-week US National Science Foundation summer program for African American students.
Phillips went on to have a long and illustrious industrial chemistry career, predominantly focused on developing novel chromatography columns for biomolecules and small molecules. She retired in 2013 after spending nearly 3 decades at Waters, in the lab and in marketing and business development roles. Extensive work travel, especially that undertaken for her director posts, showed her the importance of a global chemistry community. And while she has thrived in her work, she has overcome many barriers along the way.
In Phillips’s presidential year, she will support initiatives to boost the number of chemical technical professionals in industry and highlight the advantages of ACS membership to industrial chemists. She will also draw on her experience to help ACS and chemistry as a whole become more diverse and global.
Throughout her career, Phillips has been a champion for diversity, equity, inclusion, and respect (DEIR). This drive originates from her early years growing up under racial segregation in Nashville, Tennessee. Rosa Parks and the 1955 bus boycott inspired her family to become active in the civil rights movement. Her family became one of the first Black families to settle in a predominantly White neighborhood. Phillips grew up to become a trailblazer, and her perseverance and desire to effect change paved the way for other Black chemists, particularly women.
Phillips started her bachelor’s degree in chemistry at the historically Black university now known as Tennessee State University. Two years later, she transferred to Vanderbilt University with support from a Rockefeller Foundation scholarship. “When I finished high school, Vanderbilt was not an option, as it was not integrated,” she says. It was racially integrated soon afterward, and there were only a few Black students on campus when Phillips arrived. Neither the faculty nor the student body was ready for Black students to be there, she says. Phillips persevered, and in 1967, she became the first Black woman to earn an undergraduate degree from Vanderbilt University.
After graduating, Phillips stayed at Vanderbilt for a year of psychopharmaceutical research. It was there she got her first taste of chromatography, using it to separate serotonin from other neurotransmitters in the brain. Phillips and her new husband, James E. Phillips, then moved to the Chemistry Department at the University of Cincinnati to study for PhDs. Dorothy J. Phillips’s brother, Robert C. Wingfield Jr., was already studying at the same university, and Phillips says she instantly felt much more at home there. “Quite the contrast to the Vanderbilt environment, the environment in Cincinnati was accustomed to being integrated,” Phillips says. Her PhD involved studying the conformation of the protein coat of the single-stranded RNA virus R17 using circular dichroism spectroscopy. Phillips became the first African American woman to earn a PhD in chemistry at the University of Cincinnati.
In 1974, Phillips, her husband, and their children Anthony and Crystal moved north to Midland, Michigan; the next summer, their daughter Vickie joined them. Phillips spent nearly 10 years at Dow Chemical as a research scientist further developing circular dichroism spectroscopy and researching how antibiotics in animal feed affect growth. She also played a key role in establishing a more inclusive environment at Dow and in the Midland community. “We formed the Midland Black Coalition and began to have programs and activities that pulled us together in the community,” she says. These activities included “programs for the children to help them come together and have a sense of who they were.” Later, Phillips helped organize chapters of the National Organization for the Professional Advancement of Black Chemists and Chemical Engineers and the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, societies that she is still part of today.
While at Dow, Phillips also had to overcome barriers for mothers in the scientific workforce. “When I went to Dow Chemical, the children at public schools were still going home for lunch because most of the mothers didn’t work,” she says. To get around this issue, she enrolled her children in a Lutheran school, which did not send the children home for lunch.
A decade later, the Phillips family moved to the Boston area. Phillips joined the newly established bioseparation column chemistry group at Waters. “I was hired by Waters to develop chromatography columns for proteins, peptides, and nucleic acids because it was 1984 and the beginning of the biotechnology industry,” she says. The move meant she reentered an environment that wasn’t well integrated. She says that the hiring director made it clear “that I might find it to be uncomfortable at Waters because not everyone was ready for working with people of color.” Having survived bias at Vanderbilt and Dow, she says, she felt up to the challenge. “I stayed there 29-plus years,” Phillips adds.
In her earlier days at Waters, Phillips helped develop the Accell Plus and Protein-Pak families of sorbents and columns for biomolecules. The company then shifted its focus back to the purification and analysis of small molecules suitable for the pharmaceutical and environmental markets. “I had to prove that I could work as a chemist, that I was not just a biochemist,” Phillips says. She went on to play a critical role in the development of the Symmetry family of columns for small molecules. This project was the first time Phillips traveled internationally for work. “I got on the road, traveling to do seminars and to present the research work that I had done at conferences and international meetings,” she says.
The launch of another product line she helped develop—the Oasis solid-phase extraction products—sparked a career change for Phillips. Oasis products contain a Waters-patented technology that enables the sorbent to be water wettable, resulting in higher and faster recoveries of analytes. This family of products is still on the shelf today and has expanded to a wider range suitable for broader applications. “These are still flagship products today [and] bringing in revenue,” Phillips says. In 1996, she joined Waters’s chemistry marketing group as a brand manager. This role involved extensive travel to train staff in the US, Europe, and Asia on Oasis products and to grow the line’s customer base.
Next, Phillips was promoted to a director level within the marketing team as director of consumables in the clinical market. She supported marketing for Waters’s new mass spectrometry group, which was developing tools to detect disease-related metabolites in newborns. “This put me in Manchester, England, heavily because that’s where our mass spectrometry group was,” she says.
In 2006, Phillips became director of strategic marketing, a role that included technology acquisition. “I talked to university professors to see if we wanted to license their technology to make new column chemistries,” she says. “This [role] took me to Thailand, Japan, China, Taiwan, Korea, and all over Europe.” One partnership she forged, with an academic group in Dalian, China, led to that group’s purchase of Waters’s first ultraperformance liquid chromatography product. Another memorable project from that time was promoting Waters technology to those organizing the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. “Working with the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention to get Waters products in was a big role [for me] at one point,” Phillips says. A variety of Waters products went on to be used during these Olympics, including those able to test for clean water and food.
Phillips’s first experience of ACS was attending Tennessee State University’s student chapter meetings. She went on to join the society as a graduate student in 1973 so that she could present her research at a central regional meeting. While at Dow, she continued to present at central regional meetings as well as those organized by ACS divisions and her local section.
It was at Waters that Phillips started volunteering for ACS. She and the chair of the Northeastern Section at the time, Joseph Billo, attended the same church. “One Sunday, he asked me if I would chair Project SEED for the section,” she says. Project SEED provides summer research projects in academic, industry, and government laboratories for high school students from lower socioeconomic groups. A few years later, when she was the Northeastern Section chair, Phillips attended her first national meeting, where she was introduced to the governance structure of ACS. In 1996, Phillips became a member of the Committee on Membership Affairs. She went on to sit on more than a dozen other national ACS committees and subcommittees until her retirement from Waters in 2013. During the same period, she held chair-succession positions in the Analytical Chemistry Division and served as a long-term councilor for the Northeastern Section.
Phillips says volunteering with ACS while working in industry had many benefits for her. “Industry can be isolating,” she says, and volunteering helped her develop a wide network, especially among academics. As a result of her ACS work, she says, she now has many colleagues and friends in the Boston area and throughout the US. “My world is much bigger now than just those that I could meet at Waters or at the technical conferences . . . focused on chromatography,” she says. Additionally, volunteering with ACS helped her develop leadership skills.
Phillips retired from Waters in 2013 and shortly afterward was elected to the ACS Board of Directors as a director-at-large. Since 2014, she has represented ACS on the Science and Human Rights Coalition of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and says this is one of her favorite parts of her board role. This coalition is a network of societies and groups working to engage more scientific and engineering communities in global human rights advocacy. The lessons Phillips has learned from the group have helped ACS strengthen its science and human rights program, which highlights chemistry’s role in addressing human rights issues and raises awareness about chemists’ rights. Phillips also led ACS’s 2020 effort to grow and increase DEIR initiatives, through her role as chair of the Board Committee on Professional and Member Relations. Outcomes included introducing an ACS goal specifically in that area—“Embrace and advance inclusion in chemistry”—and recruiting the first vice president of DEIR, Rajendrani Mukhopadhyay.
In fall 2023, Phillips was elected ACS president-elect for 2024. There have been two African American presidents of ACS, Henry A. Hill in 1977 and Joseph S. Francisco in 2010, but no African American women have served as president. Phillips’s 9 years on the ACS Board of Directors gave her a firm “understanding of who ACS was,” Phillips says. “I have the drive and the passion to want ACS to be the society for everybody, not just people of color but everybody worldwide, and I have the global background. So I thought a lot of the pieces were there for the ACS we have today, and I should step out.” She also felt that being the first African American woman ACS president was a challenge that her husband, James, who died in 2018, would have supported her in. And while she may not be president of the US, when asked how she feels about fulfilling her childhood dream of becoming a president, Phillips says, “I feel blessed.”
Dorothy J. Phillips’s American Chemical Society presidential term started on Jan. 1. She recently spoke with C&EN about what she would like to accomplish in the coming year. This interview was edited for length and clarity.
What are your plans for the presidential initiative, Building Chemistry Careers Inclusively?
My focus is on supporting the ACS Strategic Initiative on Fostering a Skilled Technical Workforce. The purpose of this program is to work with community colleges to change the dialogue that STEM [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics] careers require a 4-year degree or higher. This work is needed to ensure that there are enough chemical technical professionals in the future. Supporting community college chemistry students will also make careers in chemistry more accessible to more people. I am working with the ACS Education Division and AACT, the American Association of Chemistry Teachers, to increase awareness of this demographic of the workforce and with the ACS Office of Philanthropy to seek support for the skilled technical workforce initiative.
How will you be working to help ACS grow its reach globally?
Nothing beats feet on the ground. For ACS to grow globally, we have to be out there talking to international members and learning from them what they need from ACS. In May 2024, I traveled to Brazil to meet the ACS Brazil international chapter members at the 47th Brazilian Chemical Society Annual Meeting. I’m hoping for more opportunities to talk directly with ACS international chapter members. I am also working with the ACS Committee on International Activities on a symposium on science and human rights at ACS Fall 2025 and will be supporting our first international member of the board of directors, who starts in January.
How will you be leveraging your industrial background to help ACS grow its industrial membership?
When I became a volunteer with ACS, there were more industrial members than academic members. Today, our numbers are significantly lower. In my talks, I’m emphasizing the fact that I am an industrial chemist. I’m also talking to the membership team and Board Committee on Corporation Associates about what else can be done to attract industrial members.
What else do you hope to achieve during your presidency?
I want to inspire our future chemical leaders and young scientists. I hope that young scientists of color will see me in this role and realize that they can also achieve leadership roles within ACS. When you don’t see people who look like you in roles, it’s hard to imagine yourself in them. As president-elect, I have given talks reflecting on being a trailblazer and a scientist in the civil rights era. I plan to do more of these talks in 2025 so that I can connect with people and be a role model for them.
Nina Notman is a freelance writer based in Salisbury, England.
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