Angela K. Wilson

John A. Hannah Distinguished Professor, Department of Chemistry

Ph.D., University of Minnesota
AWU/DOE Postdoctoral Fellow, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Angela K. Wilson is the John A. Hannah Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at Michigan State University. She is also the Associate Dean for Strategic Initiatives in the MSU College of Natural Sciences and the Director of the MSU Center for Quantum Computing, Science, and Engineering (MSU-Q).

In 2022, Angela was the President of the American Chemical Society (ACS), the largest scientific society in the world, and lead the ~500-member National Council. She is currently immediate past president and serves on the ACS Board of Directors (2021-2023). During 2016-2018, she served as the Director (head) of the Division of Chemistry at the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF). At NSF, her responsibilities included leading the strategic direction and national funding priorities in chemistry for NSF, with research investments of nearly $1B across the nation during her time in this role, and leading a direct-report staff of ~40.

Prior to this role, she was the Associate Vice Provost for Faculty at the University of North Texas (UNT), a university of ~40,000 students. In this role, she was head of UNT’s Office of Faculty Success, and worked with UNT’s 2,400 faculty members and 58 department chairs, providing and leading professional development opportunities including training and mentoring programs encompassing topics including leadership development, promotion and tenure, conflict and resolution, writing and research. She was also involved in the development of University policies and procedures, led faculty recognition programs, and led UNT’s Leadership Fellows program.

At UNT she was Regents Professor of Chemistry and Founder and Director of the Center for Advanced Scientific Computing and Modeling (CASCaM), which grew to nearly one hundred researchers and ultimately, brought in approximately one-third of the university’s externally funded dollars. She spent two years as a Faculty Fellow in UNT’s Office of the Provost, and, also spent ten years as graduate advisor for the Department of Chemistry, responsible for working with over one hundred graduate students per year, and spent six years as Assistant Chair of the Chemistry Department.

Among her national and international honors are Fellow of the American Chemical Society, Fellow of the American Physical Society, Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, National Associate of the National Academies, Francis P. Garvan-John M. Olin Medal (ACS), International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) Distinguished Woman in Chemistry, National Honorary Award of Iota Sigma Pi, and the Wilfred T. Doherty Award. She has also given many endowed lectures including the Robert S. Mulliken Lecture at the University of Georgia, the Karton-Barton Lecture at the University of Oklahoma, and the Charles A. Abbott Lecture at the University of North Dakota.

She has served as Chair of the Chemistry Section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Councilor for the American Chemical Society, representing the Division of Physical Chemistry, and as President of the Division of Physical and Biophysical Chemistry of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC). She is on the editorial board of Scientific Reports and on the editorial advisory board of Cell Reports Physical Chemistry and the Journal of Physical Chemistry. She is also an editor of Frontier of Computational Chemistry. She is on the boards of QuSTEAM, a non-profit organization dedicated to training and education the future workforce in quantum information science and engineering and on EeroQ, a quantum hardware company.

She has published ~200 papers on her research, spanning quantum mechanical method development to environmental science. Her computational chemistry methodologies are utilized worldwide.

She earned a Ph.D. in chemical physics from the University of Minnesota and a B.S. in chemistry from Eastern Washington University. She was then a postdoctoral fellow at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. She completed MBA coursework in organizational behavior, management, and accounting at the University of Oklahoma, and has participated in significant professional leadership training such as via the Institute for Management and Leadership in Education at the Harvard Institute for Higher Education, the Big Ten Academic Alliance Academic Leadership Program, American Council on Education (ACE) National Women’s Leadership Forum, and Leadership Texas. She now serves as a facilitator for the American Chemical Society’s Leadership Development Program.

She has also written about the professional development of faculty and department chair development and strategies (i.e., transition planning, mini-sabbaticals, and tiered mentoring approaches).

Her computational chemistry methodologies are utilized worldwide.