ACS Pride
ACS PRIDE is committed to building a community where LGBTQ+ chemists feel seen, supported, and empowered. As part of this mission, we’re excited to share our programming and events for ACS Spring 2025 in San Diego! Mark your calendars and join us in celebrating research excellence, networking, and community-building opportunities.
A Message from the ACS Pride Chair
ACS Pride Members,
Hello!
The subdivision has been hard at work to lay the groundwork for a more engaged, connected community. I am excited to share more about those efforts.
For those of you I haven’t had the chance to meet yet, I would like to introduce myself. My name is Sam Brunclik and I’m the current Chair of ACS Pride for 2025- 2026. I’m originally from rural northwest Wisconsin, where I grew up on a small farm in the country. I attended St. Olaf College in Minnesota, where I received my B.A. in chemistry and worked on novel first-row transition-metal catalyst design. Then, I conducted my graduate research at The University of Kansas (KU). There, I also continued my work with first-row transition-metals, particularly manganese, studying Mn metalloenzyme model complexes using both computational and synthetic techniques. Following the completion of my PhD in the winter of 2024, I am currently working in a molecular biosciences lab at KU on an NIH Institutional Research and Academic Career Development Awards (IRACDA) postdoctoral fellowship program studying computational biology with a focus on metalloenzyme classification. But that’s enough about me!
I’m here to update you all on some goings-on in the Pride Subdivision! First off, I would like to invite you all to join us at the ACS Spring Meeting in San Diego for 2 events hosted by Pride.
- Sunday, March 23rd, from 2 – 5:30 PM PDT: ACS Pride – Excellence in Chemistry Symposium celebrates the 7 recipients of this year’s ACS Pride Merck Graduate Research Award. This symposium will take place in room 25C in the San Diego Convention Center.
- Tuesday, March 25th, from 5:30 – 7:30 PDT: ACS Presidential LGBTQ+ and Allies Reception, cosponsored by the ACS Presidential Succession [Mary Carroll, Dorothy Philipps, and Rigoberto Hernandez]. This will take place at the South Pool Deck of the San Diego Mariott Marquis.
In addition to the events hosted by Pride, PROF will also be hosting an open meeting on Tuesday, March 25th from 1-4 pm PDT in the Solana room at the San Diego Marriott Marquis. Also, if you see me around the meeting, feel free to stop me and say hello! I love to meet and chat with members whenever possible!
Now, I have mentioned some great work that’s been happening behind the scenes. Pride is revamping our online presence and building out our communication ability. Thanks to some amazing volunteers, we have been able to get accounts up and running on X, Bluesky, Instagram, and LinkedIn as well as preparing this new newsletter (more on that shortly).
We have also been working to update our webpage to better provide information and communication between our members and leadership. The new page will feature dedicated pages for contacting us with useful information, photos from events, news, articles, and exciting achievements, as well as a second form dedicated to making volunteering with Pride an easy experience! Our goal is to be sharing more information with our members, hopefully including resources like grant opportunity information, mental health resource links, and much more. If you have any suggestions on what you’d like to see, please reach out to me at acspride@acsprof.org!
One of the big projects I have been wanting to establish is this newsletter! To start, we will be sending out this newsletter about every other month as a way to share relevant information and opportunities for our members. So, make sure to keep an eye out for that in your inbox in the future!
I’m also working on some other exciting projects for Pride that I plan to share in future updates, once they have been established a bit more! If you have ideas for things that you’d like to see Pride do in the future, please reach out to me at the email above to set up a meeting to discuss your ideas!
Finally, I want to address our current situation, in light of the recent hostile climate
for DEI initiatives from the U.S. federal administration. I know this has been an extremely challenging and, frankly, scary time for many of us in the community – both in terms of funding/job security as well as emotionally as human beings. Please know you are not alone. We have this great network of fellow chemical professionals who are right there with you. Please make use of that community as much as possible. Your feelings are valid and please take time for self-care now more than ever. Things may be rough but remember that nobody can take your joy, and you deserve to do things that make you happy when you can. In terms of Pride, currently I have not been made aware of anything that will affect our operations or mission, and I plan to continue on pushing for representation and community until someone forces me to stop. I am a part of multiple ACS governance activities as a representative from Pride, and I plan to do everything in my power to make use of those roles advocating for our community. ACS office of Inclusion and Belonging has also shared with me that,
“The American Chemical Society will continue to uphold our core value of inclusion and belonging for all those working with and in the chemical sciences. We see the work of our Committees, Divisions, and business units as vital to advancing our core values, commitment, vision, and mission at ACS. A thriving scientific community requires all those involved in the chemical sciences, from every background, to do their best work.”
In addition, ACS has reaffirmed the importance of inclusion in its most recent strategic plan, which took effect in January of this year. You should have received a statement from ACS recently regarding this as well.
With all that, I’ll sign off here with the following: 1) Keep an eye out for many more opportunities for networking and communications from Pride this coming year and 2) Stay strong, proud, and unapologetically yourself. You’re not alone and we are all made better when we share our true selves with each other.
In solidarity,
Sam Brunclik, PhD
ACS Pride Chair
