SEAC Board of Directors (BOD) held a virtual meeting on August 15, 2021. Focus of this meeting was to consider revisions to the Awards Committee makeup and processes, which were first raised at the BOD meeting earlier this year at Pittcon. At this meeting, an amendment to change Article VII, Section 5 (Awards Committee) was passed. The Bylaws have been updated accordingly. The chair of the Awards Committee shall now encourage commonly accepted best practices for jurors, as recommended by the ACS Division of Analytical Chemistry, to minimize implicit and unintentional bias in the nominations review and ranking process.
Moving forward, the Chair of the Awards Committee shall distribute the following rules/process to each juror prior to review of award nominations:
- Members of the awards committee will create a preliminary ranking of nominees in order of merit for the award, ranked from 1 to the number of nominations received, with 1 being the lowest-ranked (least meritorious) nomination.
- The Chair of the Awards Committee will compile the preliminary ranking of nominees from all members of the committee to determine an initial ranking.
- The preliminary vote will be used to identify the top two nominees (or more in the case of a tie), determined by compiling rankings from each member of the awards committee.
- In the case of more than two nominees, a run-off between the two top nominees (identified above) will be held. Each member of the committee will vote to indicate a preference between the two nominees. The nominee with the most votes will be selected as the award winner.
- Any member of the Awards Committee shall recuse themselves from voting on a nominee for which they serve as a primary nominator in the preliminary ranking. This does not include seconding letters, only the nominator. All voting members of the Awards Committee are allowed to vote in the run-off.