Salt Lake City Tuesday Day 5

The day ended with the Annual Awards Banquet. It is a black tie affair for the awardees and most of the attendees as well. It is usually very elegant. There were about 37 awardees, but of that group only one African American awardee, Dr. Shirley McBay of the Quality Education for Minorities group. She is one of the women in my book and I suggested that she be nominated for the ACS Award for Encouraging Disadvantaged students into the Chemical Sciences. She is only the 4th African American woman to win any ACS national award and I believe only one man has won an award. I am trying to work to change this. I would like to see minorities and especially African Americans be nominated and win ACS national awards for research and not just mentoring. I am working on it.
Dr. McBay gave her award talk in the Environmental Chemists Division. She talked about environmental racism and how the ACS and anyone in the community can help to change this. People of color and poor people suffer from environmental racism in that they may live near toxic waste dumps or poor air quality or just lead paint in the housing. There are groups working on the clean up. I will write the full story of her talk for the Women Chemist Newsletter and he Committee on Minority Affairs Newsletter as well.
I had breakfast with the Public Relations group of the ACS. They are going to roll out some new tools to help us and they wanted our input as to what they should do. It was a very productive meeting and many ideas were generated.
Then I went to the convention center to pick up the press release about the DNA paper as it was not in my kit. I wrote the story there in the press room.
The women chemist luncheon was held in the convention center. The speaker was the 2009 Garvan-Olin Medal winner Kathlyn Parker. She gave a talk about her life and her research.
After the luncheon I made my only visit to the exposition which was very large. I did not stay long because I would have needed my scouter to see all of it and I did not pick up the scouter that the ACS rented for me.
After Dr. McBay's talk I went to see Dr. William Carroll win the Henry Hill award. Dr. Henry Hill was the first African American ACS president back in the 70tys.
That completes the circle of my day. Tomorrow is the last full day of the meeting for me.
Jeannette Brown