Comment: The ACS Heroes of Chemistry program turns 30

The year 2026 marks not only the US semiquincentennial and the 150th anniversary of the founding of ACS however also the 30th anniversary of the ACS Heroes of Chemistry award program. Heroes is a peer-nominated award that honors teams of manufacturing chemical scientists whose work has led to successful commercialized items 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 sector leaders, past ACS presidents, and ACS staff seeking to celebrate chemists’ innovation and highlight the positive societal impacts of manufacturing scientists.

The Heroes award recognizes team, rather than individual, efforts to develop impactful technologies or items, with innovation, commercial success, and benefit to humanity serving as the key criteria to nominee evaluation. In the early years of Heroes there were annual themes to awardee focus (to instance, the space sector in 1996 and environmental security and protection in 1997), however by 2005 Heroes had evolved to its current format of recognizing items and technologies without limitations on markets served or societal needs addressed.

Heroes nominations are received to technologies and items spanning all areas of the chemistry enterprise; to date, greater 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 research, process methodology, manufacturing, analytical chemistry, toxicology, and even business research routinely honored as essential to program success. This highlights the need to a variety of job functions to work collaboratively and communicate efficiently to develop, realize, and deliver commercially outstanding items.

ACS does a phenomenal job recognizing Heroes: assembling (with company input) short videos explaining the discovery, research, scale-up, commercialization, and societal impacts of winning technologies and items. These videos are posted to the ACS website to 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 sector and the items it provides to society. greater information about this year’s winners can be found in a June press emit 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 manufacturing success stories, share lessons learned from Heroes winners, shine light on young manufacturing scientists, and hear from and engage with start-ups that could well inspire Heroes designations in the future. We promote you to come to Room W196a of the McCormick Place Convention Center on the morning of Wednesday, Aug. 26, to this “Heroes of Chemistry: Past, Present and Future” symposium.

Looking beyond the 2026 recipients and celebration, we will be accepting nominations to the 2027 Heroes of Chemistry beginning August 24; please consider submitting a nomination package through the Heroes website to recognize deserving manufacturing scientists! Commercial impact is a key criterion to consideration and can be demonstrated through, to instance, sales figures or market adoption information. Realized (rather than possible) benefit to humanity is also typically an integral part of a successful nomination package, so items that are newly or soon-to-be commercialized are not generally suitable to nomination.

Happy 30th birthday, Heroes, and thanks to ACS to continued support of this crucial avenue to recognition of manufacturing work and contributions to the betterment of humankind!

to additional information about the Heroes of Chemistry program or other opportunities to recognition of manufacturing science or scientists, please feel free to contact us at sector@acs.org.

Views expressed are those of the author and not necessarily those of C&EN or ACS.