Dear Members of PROF,
First off, I would like to personally wish everyone a happy and healthy new year! May this year bring you personal and professional growth. As we enter the new year, I would like to start off by thanking Katherine Johnson for her tremendous leadership last year as chair. Her hard work helped us celebrate our 50th anniversary and continue growing our membership. Thank you for your service and I look forward to working with you and Sue Schelble, our chair-elect, this year to achieve our vision of Elevating Professionalism.
I also want to take this time to personally welcome our newer members to the division. Over the past two years, we have added over 500 new members. Part of the value of being a member of PROF is the community and professional network that comes with it. I can say with utmost confidence that this division contains some of the longest-serving ACS volunteers within the society, making it one of the best networks to be a part of. If you have been a PROF member for quite some time, I am writing to ask you to extend the same mentorship and leadership that was given to you early in your time within PROF to our newest members. PROF has prided itself on helping shape and grow the professional careers of many chemists over the past 50 years and we look forward to continuing to do so for the next 50 years and beyond.
Another goal of this message is to take the time to outline some of my overarching goals for my year as chair. Some of the things I would like to achieve include:
Membership Value: Provide exclusive programming, new professional development resources, and mentorship opportunities to our members to help them grow professionally.
Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Respect: Enable our subdivisions to not only succeed but thrive within the division. Our subdivisions underpin some of our most important core values as a division. I look to our membership to get involved with our subdivisions, make your voices heard, and help us provide the opportunities and resources needed.
Collaboration: Strengthen the bonds between our division and mirrored ACS governance units. We are given the benefit of having many society committees and offices that overlap with our goals. Combining efforts to achieve our mission and vision can help us reach newer heights as a division.
Involvement: Our volunteers have allowed us to sustain over the past 50 years and they will be just as important for the next 50. We have started to see new faces getting involved within the division’s leadership and I hope to see this continue. Volunteering and attending PROF events allow us to not only help our members grow their networks more, but also provide more opportunities to our members through awards, programming, and content.
So how will we accomplish this? We have many exciting events already planned for this year. So I ask you to look out for them, put them on your calendar, and I hope to engage with you at some of them. These events include (1) Our first ACS Pride-Merck Graduate Research Award symposium in NOLA, (2) Several exciting webinars cosponsored by the division, (3) Networking events at our national meetings and in the virtual space throughout the year, and (4) award opportunities and receptions.
Please stay tuned for more communication throughout the year and we look forward to engaging with you! If you aren’t sure where to start, please reach out to me or anyone on the executive committee and we will find ways to get you involved!
Thanks,
Jarrod Cohen
2024 PROF Chair
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