Early Career Chemistry Education Scholars Committee

Over the years, this committee started as a grassroots organization and grew to a permanent committee in DivCHED as the Younger Chemistry Education Scholars (YCES) committee. The committee hosted several staple events that seek to bring people together including events related to networking, professional skills development, career materials development, and recruiting/outreach efforts to attract more people into the field of CER. At the 2018 BCCE, our social event brought more than 115 young researchers together for informal social gathering with a few professional activities mixed in. These events help researchers feel as though they have a community to go to when they have questions about their research.

In 2022, the DivCHED approved the committee’s request to formally change the name of the committee to Early Career Chemistry Education Scholars (ECCES), to become more inclusive of graduate students, postdocs, and pre-tenure faculty of any age. Our current activities include hosting the Graduate Student Research symposium at BCCE and Spring ACS meetings to provide a supportive environment for graduate students to present their budding research and organizing networking events to connect our early career scholars together.

Additionally, ECCES has sponsored a blog featuring articles from the community about research, professional development, and work-life balance for those in chemistry education research. This blog is one of our staple tools in informing people about what life is like as a young chemistry education researcher.

Because ECCES does so many things related to chemistry education research, we frequently collaborate with the Chemistry Education Research Committee (CERC). The two committees have co-sponsored professional events and an annual poster competition at the national ACS meetings. We look forward to future collaborations with this and other DivCHED committees. Additionally, we also have collaborated with the ACS Division Younger Chemists Committee (YCC). This organization clearly has some overlap with the goals of ECCES and we have been known to co-host events with them as well.