Catawba student Amber Williamson, a junior chemistry major from Lexington who was selected and participated in the 2014 American Chemical Society’s Leadership Institute in January in Dallas, Texas, has been asked to serve as a liaison for the American Chemical Society.

Williamson will serve on the American Chemical Society Committee on Education Undergraduate Programs Advisory Board. She is the only student liaison to this board which is also comprised of eight to 12 faculty members and an industry representative. Her role will be to suggest ideas to the advisory board about student-planned and hosted programming; assist in identifying student volunteers; gather student feedback for the advisory board; assist in planning the undergraduate social; and help identify general programming that may be appropriate for undergraduates.

In her new role as student liaison to the advisory board, Williamson will also attend the 248th American Chemical Society’s National Meeting and Exposition in August in San Francisco, Calif., and the 249th ACS National Meeting & Exposition in March, 2015, in Denver, Colo.

Williamson was one of only 16 students in the country to receive the 2014 Student Leadership Award and be invited to attend the aforementioned leadership institute that recognizes emerging leaders in the ACS student chapter network.

She was also one of five Catawba College students who spent this past summer interning at the North Carolina Research Campus in Kannapolis helping to gather and organize data in a project that will ultimately result in a knowledge database to help improve human nutrition. She was a part of the $1.5 million Plant Pathways Elucidation Project, a program that brought together university scientists, industry professionals and students from a variety of North Carolina colleges and universities, in a new collaborative research model.