Please Vote for Neal Byington

Introduction:

Hi, I am running for the postion of Chair-Elect in the California Section of the American Chemical Society. For the duration of this election this Web page will provide Chair-Elect campaign related information about myself, my previous professional chemistry related activites, my background of previous and current ACS activites, and my views of what I think is good about the California Section and where we I think that we can improve our services to our members.

The California Section has a wonderful and extremely hard-working group of volunteer chemists who for decades have contributed so much to our science. I would like to continue our fine activities and add to our present activities two new efforts: (1) make the Section more member-friendly; and (2) make the section more member-valuable.

I warmly invite everyone to attend our Section meetings and activites. You are invited and encouraged to meet and have conversations with your fellow members and guests at all Section meetings. The discussions are fascinating, the insights are interesting to say the least, and the net result is that over time you become a better chemist and a more productive and aware member of our community.

For our Section to become more member-valuable we need a slight change of focus and perhaps the addition of new meetings, seminars, and symposia to provide an inexpensive way for our members to become individually more valuable as chemists. If we can manage to increase the level of chemical awareness of our membership then each member will become a more valuable chemist in the future than they are at present. If we can continue to offer a Section full of chemists who are not only the best and the brightest but also the most current, most highly trained, most productive, and with the greatest chemical awareness we will be able to present current and future employers of chemists a hard choice in our favor - either locate your laboratory in our area and have great success or locate it and out-source the work elsewhare and rapidly fall behind and fail at great financial loss. Let no one forget that this is the Section where our top members put their initials on the Periodic Table.