ChemLuminary Award


The WCC sponsors one award for local sections each year to be presented at the ChemLuminary ceremony during the ACS Fall National Meeting. The ACS ChemLuminary Awards recognize volunteer participants in ACS Local Sections and Divisions whose efforts have helped to achieve excellence. In order to provide the opportunity to focus on different aspects of the WCC’s mission – to be leaders in attracting, developing, promoting and advocating for women in the chemical sciences – WCC rotates the category for the award on an annual basis.
2023 WCC ChemLuminary Award Winner
The 25th Annual ChemLuminary Awards ceremony was held at the San Francisco Marriott Marquis on Tuesday, August 15, 2023. The celebration began with a poster session and reception, followed by the presentations of awards given by 22 committees of the Society. This year’s theme, “Harnessing the Power of Our Volunteers,” honored ACS volunteers’ work to continue improving all people’s lives through the transforming power of chemistry. WCC presented two awards this year. The Most Outstanding Local Section Women Chemists Committee Award was presented to the Nashville Local Section and the Best Local Section Women Chemists Event/Activity Award was presented to the Puerto Rico Local Section.
Nomination Deadline
February 15, 2024
Send nominations to wcc@acs.org and/or include the event details in the organization’s Annual Report
How to Nominate
Your section can self-nominate for a WCC ChemLuminary Award when submitting the section’s annual report to the ACS national office or your section can submit nominations directly to WCC. Plenty of local sections engage in award-worthy activities, but if they don’t “blow their own horns,” WCC can’t recognize them!
Self nominations often include:
- A description of the event
- How the award theme has been realized
- How many people attended
- Source of the funds
- What did and did not work
- Obstacles encountered and overcome
- Photographs
- Links to websites
In addition, there are two mandatory questions:
- What made your event/program outstanding? (Answers to this question may include information about the event attendance, feedback from participants, media attention, etc.)
- How does your event/program support the mission of the WCC?
Please include a photo of your activity if you have one. If you have already submitted your report via your local section annual report – great work! Please forward a copy of the report and a photo. We would like to feature some local section WCC events in an upcoming WCC newsletter.
Note: This includes women (both cis and trans) and persons assigned female at birth (AFAB). For more information regarding the gender inclusive language used in this document, please click here