Rigoberto Hernandez elected 2025 ACS president-elect

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.

ACS members also elected four other people into ACS governance positions, including the first-ever International District director.

A total of 10,907 votes were cast for president-elect. The total voter turnout was 11.34% of all eligible voters.

Hernandez won the president-elect race against Laura Sremaniak, teaching professor and associate department head in the Department of Chemistry at North Carolina State University, and petition candidate Mukund S. Chorghade, chief scientific officer at Thinq Pharma.

“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.”

In other election news, Katherine L. Lee, executive director and head of scientific planning and operations in the Inflammation and Immunology Research Unit at Pfizer, was re-elected District I director for 2025–27, defeating Matthew Grandbois, vice president of business development at AirJoule.

Silvia S. Jurisson, a professor of chemistry and radiology at the University of Missouri, was elected District V director for 2025–27, defeating two other candidates, Lisa M. Balbes, independent consultant at Balbes Consultants, and Mark C. Cesa, retired from Ineos Nitriles.

David Wu, director and research fellow at the Institute of Chemistry at Academia Sinica, was elected ACS’s first ever International District director for 2025–27, defeating Hooi-Ling Lee, an associate professor at the School of Chemical Sciences at Universiti Sains Malaysia. The petition creating this position was approved by the ACS Council and Board of Directors in August 2023 and ratified by the members in November 2023.

Natalie A. LaFranzo, vice president of strategy at the Linus Group, was re-elected director-at-large, defeating Sergio Nanita, a senior principal investigator at Incyte.

The Committee on Nominations and Elections is accepting nominations for 2027–29 terms. If you’d like to nominate a candidate for future elections, visit nominations.acs.org. The list of current board members, official biographies, and further information about ACS governance is available at www.acs.org/about/governance.html. Official candidate statements and backgrounds for all candidates running in this election was published in C&EN in September.