The Future of Scientific Leadership is Interdisciplinary: The 2019 CAS Future Leaders Share Their Vision

Abstract

For the last decade, the CAS Future Leaders program has gathered early-career scientists from across the globe based on their outstanding accomplishments in the field of chemistry to provide support to participants in cultivating their own voices and futures in scientific leadership. The goal of the program has been to empower early-career scientists like us to begin to shape our own future leadership roles, from learning to convey effective speech by developing our own research stories to growing to be better mentors for the next generation of future leaders. In 2019, to honor the 10th anniversary of the program, the CAS Future Leaders program encompassed essential leadership skills divided into five topics, namely, storytelling, insights, strategies, perspectives, and impact, some of which were new to the program this year. However, what was not new to the program was an emphasis on the potential global impact that this program could make. To do this, the program brought together in this cohort 29 post-docs and graduate students, from 16 countries. A staple of this program is not only the breadth of countries that are represented but also the many facets of chemistry that are represented as demonstrated later in the article. One reason for this is that a leader in the sciences will need to be open to innovations across discipline and geographical boundaries, something that we explored a lot during our time together.