Madeleine Jacobs Named President And CEO Of The Council Of Scientific Society Presidents

The Council of Scientific Society Presidents (CSSP) has named American Chemical Society Executive Director and Chief Executive Officer Madeleine Jacobs as its next president and CEO. Jacobs will step into the role in January 2015, after her retirement from a 24-year career with ACS at the end of this year.

Jacobs will succeed CSSP’s interim president Gordon L. Nelson, who was ACS president in 1988. ACS publishes C&EN.

CSSP is an organization of presidents, presidents-elect, and recent past-presidents of roughly 60 scientific societies and federations, whose combined membership totals more than 1.4 million scientists and science educators.

As CSSP’s new president and CEO, “Madeleine Jacobs is an inspiring choice to provide model leadership, bold vision and imagination, and personal sophistication to this unique association of science’s top leaders,” says Martin A. Apple, who is the longest-serving CSSP president and CEO, having held that part-time role from 1993 until 2012. Apple is a pioneering biochemist and molecular biologist, who has spent most of his career at the University of California’s San Francisco and Berkeley campuses.

“I’m thrilled to be joining the CSSP in 2015 because of its important mission and the breadth of its scientific society and federation members, which reflect my life-long passions, interests, and accomplishments,” Jacobs says. “CSSP plays a really unique role in representing all the sciences, and I look forward to helping the organization achieve its objectives.”

CSSP works to help its members strengthen leadership skills in the scientific community, deliberate and adopt public policy positions on emerging issues, and act upon science research and education issues of national or international scope.