American Institute of Chemical Engineers Announces New Officers, Board for 2026

The American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) announced the upcoming transition in its Board leadership for 2026. Anne O'Neal, Manager of Process Safety Culture and Competency at Chevron (retired) and AIChE Fellow, will move from her current role as President-elect to serve as President of AIChE in 2026. O'Neal succeeds 2025 President Joseph D. Smith, Laufer Energy Chair and Professor of Chemical Engineering at Missouri University of Science and Technology and Chief Technology Officer at Elevated Analytics.

Stepping into the leadership pipeline alongside O'Neal, Brian Davison, Corporate Fellow and Chief Scientist for Biotechnology at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), has been elected to serve as AIChE's 2026 President-elect.

Newly elected members of the AIChE Board of Directors are: Rob Crane, Technology Scouting and Venturing Lead for ExxonMobil; Harold T. Conner Jr., Senior Program Manager at Strata-G, LLC; Dan Coombs, former Executive Vice President at LyondellBasell; and Gayle J. Gibson, Senior Fellow with Mission Possible Partnership. The directors serve three-year terms.

Anne O'Neal brings more than four decades of experience across process safety, health, environment, and safety leadership roles. Throughout her 42-year career, she has held several senior positions overseeing critical safety initiatives and founded Chevron's early technical career development program after earlier assignments in process engineering, operations, maintenance, and strategic planning. She also developed Chevron's first management system approach to process safety.

Anne earned her BS in chemical engineering from the University of California, Davis, where she was a founding member of the Center for Women in Engineering and served on the Chemical Engineering Department Advisory Board.

A longtime contributor to AIChE's Center for Chemical Process Safety (CCPS), Anne has been involved since the program's earliest days and has served on the CCPS Advisory Board since 2005. With colleagues, she helped pioneer the Process Safety Faculty Workshops, which have reached more than 500 faculty members worldwide. She also co-led the development of the 2005 API/IPECA sustainability reporting guidelines.

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About AIChE: AIChE is a professional society of more than 60,000 members in more than 110 countries. Its members work in corporations, universities and government using their knowledge of chemical processes to develop safe and useful products for the benefit of society. Through its varied programs, AIChE continues to be a focal point for information exchange on the frontier of chemical engineering research in such areas as nanotechnology, sustainability, hydrogen fuels, biological and environmental engineering, and chemical plant safety and security. More information about AIChE is available at https://www.aiche.org.