Credit:
Courtesy of Michael Abrams
Awards and recognition serve multiple purposes for the American Chemical Society. Recognizing excellence and achievement helps validate accomplishments and reinforce the society’s standards of excellence and hopefully serves as inspiration for future generations of professionals and leaders. Sharing information about innovative and impactful chemistry among ACS members can reinforce a sense of pride in our community, and disseminating that information beyond ACS can help others understand the activities and initiatives that the society values as well as the benefits of our endeavors to humankind. While awards are not the primary drivers of innovation, appropriate recognition is important across the chemistry enterprise, highlighting creativity and dedication from academia, industry, and government organizations.
The year 2026 marks not only the US semiquincentennial and the 150th anniversary of the founding of ACS but also the 30th anniversary of the ACS Heroes of Chemistry award program. Heroes is a peer-nominated award that honors teams of industrial chemical scientists whose work has led to successful commercialized products that benefit society—celebrating the creativity and perseverance of scientists and engineers who have significantly contributed to modern life through their advancements in chemistry. The award emerged in 1996 from discussions among industry leaders, past ACS presidents, and ACS staff seeking to celebrate chemists’ innovation and highlight the positive societal impacts of industrial scientists.
The Heroes award recognizes team, rather than individual, efforts to develop impactful technologies or products, with innovation, commercial success, and benefit to humanity serving as the key criteria for nominee evaluation. In the early years of Heroes there were annual themes for awardee focus (for example, the space industry in 1996 and environmental safety and protection in 1997), but by 2005 Heroes had evolved to its current format of recognizing products and technologies without limitations on markets served or societal needs addressed.
“Sharing information about innovative and impactful chemistry among ACS members can reinforce a sense of pride in our community, and disseminating that information beyond ACS can help others understand the activities and initiatives that the society values as well as the benefits of our endeavors to humankind.”
Heroes nominations are received for technologies and products spanning all areas of the chemistry enterprise; to date, more than 100 companies and technologies have received the Heroes designation. Each nominating company identifies the key people contributing to the product’s overall success, with representatives from all stages of research and development, process technology, manufacturing, analytical chemistry, toxicology, and even business development routinely honored as essential to program success. This highlights the need for a variety of job functions to work collaboratively and communicate effectively to develop, realize, and deliver commercially outstanding products.
ACS does a phenomenal job recognizing Heroes: assembling (with company input) short videos explaining the discovery, development, scale-up, commercialization, and societal impacts of winning technologies and products. These videos are posted to the ACS website for members and nonmembers alike to see and are shown at a ceremony honoring all the winning companies.
The banquet to recognize the Heroes class of 2026 (including teams from Novartis, Corteva, Qnity Electronics, and Gilead Sciences) is being held in conjunction with the ACS Fall 2026 meeting in Chicago, enabling winners to easily engage in the full scope of national-meeting activities. We are thrilled to have executives from the winning companies speak to the challenges each team overcame and to the roles and contributions of the winning team members. We are also honored to have representatives from ACS leadership attending the banquet—engaging with award recipients, and speaking about the importance of industry and the products it provides to society. More information about this year’s winners can be found in a June press release on the ACS website.
Additionally, in honor of the 30th anniversary of Heroes, we have organized programming at ACS Fall 2026 to provide perspective on the founding of the award, recount industrial success stories, share lessons learned from Heroes winners, shine light on young industrial scientists, and hear from and engage with start-ups that could well inspire Heroes designations in the future. We encourage you to come to Room W196a of the McCormick Place Convention Center on the morning of Wednesday, Aug. 26, for this “Heroes of Chemistry: Past, Present and Future” symposium.
Looking beyond the 2026 recipients and celebration, we will be accepting nominations for the 2027 Heroes of Chemistry beginning August 24; please consider submitting a nomination package through the Heroes website to recognize deserving industrial scientists! Commercial impact is a key criterion for consideration and can be demonstrated through, for example, sales figures or market adoption information. Realized (rather than potential) benefit to humanity is also typically an integral part of a successful nomination package, so products that are newly or soon-to-be commercialized are not generally suitable for nomination.
Happy 30th birthday, Heroes, and thanks to ACS for continued support of this important avenue for recognition of industrial work and contributions to the betterment of humankind!
For additional information about the Heroes of Chemistry program or other opportunities for recognition of industrial science or scientists, please feel free to contact us at [email protected].
Views expressed are those of the author and not necessarily those of C&EN or ACS.
