Pamela Fisher Credit:
Thomas Robert Clarke Photography
This week the American Chemical Society announced Pamela Fisher as the new senior vice president of inclusion and belonging. Fisher joins ACS from Bristol Myers Squibb, where she served as chief inclusion and diversity officer, notably leading global strategy during a time of transformation at the company.
“Pamela brings deep expertise in integrating inclusion and belonging into the core of how organizations operate,” Albert G. Horvath, CEO of ACS, says in a press release. “Her leadership will help further strengthen ACS’ commitment to foster an inclusive scientific enterprise and ensure that diverse perspectives continue to advance chemistry and its impact on society.”
“Breakthroughs accelerate when a wider range of minds and perspectives are at the table.”
Fisher has spent decades helping global organizations strengthen their engagement, culture, and leadership. Her experience includes roles at Johnson & Johnson, Quest Diagnostics, and News Corp/Fox.
“I began in government relations at News Corp, where I learned that sustainable change comes not from authority but from the ability to convene, persuade, and build coalitions across constituencies,” Fisher says. “That lesson has shaped every role since, and it is especially relevant at ACS, where progress is made through membership, technical divisions, and local sections.”
She took this foundational lesson from News Corp to the health-care industry, where Fisher “led global strategies that connected inclusion to the science itself,” she says. Examples of this include, “Shaping how clinical trials were designed, ensuring breakthrough therapies reached the patients who needed them most, and advancing inclusive product design and consumer solutions, ensuring that the company’s innovations reflected and served the full diversity of the people who relied on them.”
Her move to ACS made sense, Fisher says. She is excited about ACS’s 2025–29 strategic plan, in whose goals she sees the principles of inclusion and belonging embedded and woven throughout. “My career has been building toward scaling this kind of work for a long time by taking bold strategies and making them real in the day-to-day life of an organization,” she says.
Fisher will continue to advance and strengthen inclusion and belonging across ACS and says that various communities and coalitions coming together around a shared purpose—science—is what strengthens and advances both science and belonging. “Breakthroughs accelerate when a wider range of minds and perspectives are at the table,” she says. “Research becomes more rigorous when it reflects the full range of human experience. Therapies reach more patients, discoveries solve broader problems, and the questions science chooses to address become more relevant and consequential. When we build inclusive coalitions across academia, industry, and government, we don’t just expand who participates—we expand what’s possible.”
For Fisher, that is the real consequence of her work and something she remains energized by. She officially joins the ACS’s executive leadership team on May 26.
