Editor’s Desk: No Stopping Now

by Bibiana Campos Seijo | Editor-in-Chief and VP of C&EN Media Group | @bibianaCampos

If I had to pick a soundtrack for the month of January, it’d have to be Queen’s “Don’t stop me now”. The Christmas break is now a distant memory, since which the team here at C&EN hasn’t had the chance to catch our breath. Things have been extremely busy but we are having such a good time… We are having a ball. 

And the ball is continuing into 2020 because our plans for the year are super ambitious. 

On February 10 we published our first-ever single-topic issue dedicated to the climate emergency, the defining issue of our lifetime.

This is a topic we’ve been wanting to cover for a long time. The outcome of the United Nations Climate Change Conference in December and the bushfires that have affected Australia over the last couple of months finally tipped the balance.

In “Climate adaptation: How we’ll thrive” we’ve covered efforts to combat growing climate stress in places where food is already scarce and people need the most help, the policies that we need to protect citizens and critical infrastructure from climate change (and natural disasters in particular), current technologies to provide safe drinking water, including more efficient desalination and low-cost filters, and more. 

We have expanded our coverage beyond the print edition as well. To accompany the issue we produced a special episode of our podcast, C&EN’s Stereo Chemistry, that explores the impact that the climate crisis is having on education. The podcast focuses on the students themselves, specifically grad students, postdocs, and other early-career scientists, and, among other topics, discusses how they got into climate science and their hopes and goals for the future. 

And in just a few weeks we will publish another themed issue, in this case an expanded issue, to celebrate International Women’s Day. Set to be an annual feature with different themes each year, C&EN’s inaugural “Trailblazers” issue is due out on March 9th, complete with a guest editor curating the entire issue, and focused on women entrepreneurs.

We have never done anything like this before and are delighted that the Trailblazers inaugural issue is being sponsored by Pfizer.

In addition, Pfizer has partnered with C&EN BrandLab, our custom content studio, to collate profiles of significant women in chemistry that we will publish every day during the month of March.

Do you know a woman who should be honored? We’re accepting nominations until March 8th, and have already received over 300 submissions. [Pro-tip: self-nominations are encouraged!]

The Trailblazers issue will have a companion event that we’ll be hosting act the ACS Spring national meeting in Philadelphia. It’ll be a half day event that will kick off with a Power Hour that C&EN is organizing in partnership with Gordon Research Conferences. Our hosts for the Power Hour will be Dr. Joe DeSimone, Chairman and co-founder of Carbon, which is C&EN’s Company of the Year 2020 and one of our 2015 10 Start-ups To Watch; and Ellen Kullman, who has recently taken up the CEO position at Carbon – and is also known as DuPont’s former CEO. 

The Power Hour, which is designed to tackle issues around inclusivity in chemistry, will be followed by our first Trailblazers symposium, where a selection of the entrepreneurs featured in the issue will talk about their journeys and how they identified the need that inspired them to take the leap into entrepreneurship. We’ll also have a panel discussion about how the entrepreneurial landscape has changed – or not – over time with regard to women and under-represented minorities, what tools an entrepreneur needs to succeed in today’s startup landscape, and more.

Also during the ACS Spring national meeting we’ll be launching our next Discovery Report, a quarterly in-depth analysis on hot trends in the chemical enterprise that accompanies a C&EN print issue. The theme of our first report was AI in drug discovery and the second will focus on plastics recycling, a very deliberate choice given that the theme of the ACS meeting is “Macromolecules – 2nd century”. There is no doubt the plastics crisis is a big and elusive problem that the chemical industry globally is trying to tackle. 

Believe it or not, all this activity only takes us to mid-March. While all of this is happening we’ll also be attending Pittcon, Analytica, CPhI North America… There’s no stopping now!

In the meantime, ask us about sponsorships of any of the events or products here. From single-topic issues to C&EN’s in-depth Discovery Reports, these opportunities are a perfect fit for advertisers looking to connect with generations of chemists.