Dorothy J. Phillips serves as the 2025 President of the American Chemical Society (ACS). In this short video interview with Vera Koester and Christian Remenyi for ChemistryViews, she reflects on her professional journey, shares guidance for emerging chemists, and discusses the ongoing internationalization of the ACS.

A longer print interview was published in Nachrichten aus der Chemie, the membership magazine of the German Chemical Society (GDCh) [1].

Dorothy J. Phillips, born 1945, majored in chemistry at Tennessee State University, Nashville, TN, USA, earned her bachelor’s degree from Vanderbilt University, Nashville, in 1967 (making her the university’s first African-American woman to receive a bachelor’s degree), and her Ph.D. from the University of Cincinnati, OH, USA, in 1974 (making her the first African-American woman in Cincinnati to earn a Ph.D. in biochemistry). She began her forty-year industrial career at Dow Chemical Company and later joined the Waters Corporation. In 2013, she retired from Waters Corporation as Director, Strategic Marketing.

Dorothy J. Phillips has been a member of the ACS since 1973 and is the first African-American president of the society.

Reference

[1] Dorothy J. Phillips, Christian Remenyi, Vera Koester, Interview with ACS President: Transforming vaguely negative feelings into positive ones, Nachr. Chem. 2026. https://doi.org/10…☀

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Also of Interest

• Crossing Borders – Voices From the Community
  Katharina Käfer (Nachrichten aus der Chemie, membership magazine of the GDCh) and Vera Koester (ChemistryViews) spoke with conference participants about Crossing Borders at last year’s Science Forum Chemistry in Karlsruhe, Germany, and recorded short videos that reflect the vibrancy and diversity of the community.