Casey to lead national chemistry organization

A member of the American Chemical Society for 40 years, chemistry professor Charles Casey has now become its president.

Casey began the three-year presidential succession on Jan. 1. Serving as president-elect, president and then past-president, Casey plans to help the ACS, a professional organization consisting of some 163,000 members with interests that span all fields of chemistry, represent itself to the outside world.

“We need to help the public understand the contributions chemists make, and we need to interact more with government funding agencies, such as the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health,” says Casey.

In addition to sharing “chemistry’s exciting story” with a broader audience, Casey plans to enhance continuing education opportunities for chemists who want to update their skills, to advocate greater support for science education and to encourage more organizational support of the different sections and divisions of ACS.

His colleague Phillip Certain, dean of the College of Letters and Science, says, “Chuck is an independent thinker who is not afraid to question the accepted ways of doing things. The ACS is a large, complex and extremely successful professional society, and I’m sure that Chuck will find a way to make it even better.”

Casey, who joined ACS as an undergraduate student in 1962, says the idea of becoming president of the organization hadn’t occurred to him until last year, when someone asked him to run.

“I agreed to run because I think it’s important to have an ACS president who is an active scientist,” says Casey, who researches the underlying chemistry of industrial materials, such as plastics. He also teaches several undergraduate courses each year.

Casey says that his election depended on the network of UW–Madison graduate students and faculty who helped to share his message with ACS members at other institutions. He also credits his wife, Martha Casey, assistant vice chancellor for academic planning and analysis at UW–Madison, who was his informal campaign manager.

Casey has served as chair of different sections and divisions within ACS, and was chair of the chemistry section at the National Academy Sciences. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, he joined the UW–Madison faculty in 1968.