Anais Nguyen has demonstrated outstanding service to the section in establishing a Silicon Valley ACS (SVACS) presence in communities in our section’s southernmost reaches of Santa Cruz, Monterey, and San Benito Counties. She has organized ACS events open to the public as well as tailored to science classrooms in her home territory around the Monterey Bay.
In October 2023, Anais engaged UCSC Professor Phil Crews to speak on Wines from great vintages to wildfire catastrophes: Merging natural products chemistry fundamentals with sensory evaluations. The event took place within the UCSC Arboretum & Botanic Garden and included wine-tasting with wares from Crews’ Pelican Ranch Winery. Anais arranged a local caterer and negotiated free entrance to the Arboretum for all ACS attendees. Read about the October 7, 2023 event on the SVACS website and view its flyer that appeared in the October 2023 SVACS newsletter.
Anais has joined forces with fellow SVACSer Natalie McClure to run hands-on science workshops in the after-school program at the Salinas Community Science Workshop on the El Sausal Middle School campus. For NCW 2023, they ran cochineal dye and water surface tension experiments. They returned in April for CCEW 2024 to electroplate coins, nuts/bolts and other small objects.
On learning about SVACS Paving the Path activity on the Salinas campus of Hartnell College, Anais extended our involvement there to include an ACS booth at Hartnell’s Career and Resource Fair each Spring. With a group SVACSers she brings a science presence to that annual Career Fair. She has returned to campus to interact with members of Hartnell’s nascent Chem Club who benefit from her mentoring from her professional role at IBM Research in environmental health and safety.
Anais finds herself on the Hartnell campus as the SVACS representative for the Paving the Path Career Panel and Watch Party extravaganza. She coordinates with Hartnell faculty and staff the logistics of the pizza-fueled event. Together with her recruited partner scientist Mike Lepisto, following the Zoomed panel they field questions from the chemistry students and guide discussions of careers in science.
Recognizing the importance of agriculture in the Salinas Valley, Anais secured two dates in autumn 2024 at Driscoll’s Berries headquarters R&D labs in Watsonville for college chemistry field trips. Once in October and again in November, she arranged for chemistry and agriculture classes from Cal State University Monterey Bay and from Hartnell Community College to tour Driscoll’s breeding technology labs that include analytical chemistry and molecular biology. She took the visits to the next level by arranging lunch between the students, their teachers, and Driscoll scientists to foster round-table discussion. The combination of lab tours and one-on-one career counseling enriched a student body that had only known Driscoll’s as an employer for fruit-picking and processing, not for doing science. This exposure for mostly first-generation students to local scientific professional workplaces promotes an important part of the SVACS mission: career development.
In this same spirit, Anais steps up to address requests submitted to SVACS for mentoring middle school science fair students in the Monterey area. She takes pride in serving as a science advisor to local students, and gladly supports SVACS in doing so.
Anais Nguyen shares her interest in supporting the communities of the Monterey Bay area with the mission of Silicon Valley ACS to inform the public about science. Our section is fortunate to have an SVACS activist in our section’s southern reaches for which we confer the recognition of the 2025 Abraham Ottenberg Service Award.
