Chemistry Solutions

The couple whose hard work started it all: Clifford and Kitty Hach, 1980s. Photo courtesy of ACS.

Each year, the ACS-Hach Programs provide over $2.5 million in scholarships and grants to current and future high school chemistry teachers. The two individuals whose vision and dedication made these programs possible, Clifford and Kathryn Hach, met in college, married, and later co-founded a successful chemistry company. Together, they pioneered the development of easy-to-use standardized water testing and water purification kits, bringing both awareness and solutions to the issue of improving water quality around the world.

Kitty, the entrepreneur

Kathryn (Kitty) Carter was born in Missouri and, at the age of five, took her first airplane ride with her father, an amateur aviation enthusiast. Young Kitty wasn’t someone to be bound by the traditional rules about what females were and weren’t allowed to do. As a child, she adored dressing up as a pilot and spending time in her father’s airplane. During the Great Depression, Kitty was distraught when her father had to sell his plane, and she vowed to someday own one of her own.

Later, determined to go to college, Kitty raised and sold turkeys to make enough money to pay tuition for her freshman year. She eventually transferred to Iowa State College (now Iowa State University) with the intention of becoming a home economics teacher. There, she was inspired and intrigued by the subject of chemistry after attending lectures by Nellie May Naylor. Naylor was a rare female chemistry professor who endeavored to bring chemistry to the attention of women through her unique teaching style, and a focus on the chemistry found in everyday life. Soon, Kitty also met another chemist who intrigued her.

Clifford, the chemist

Clifford Hach grew up on an Iowa farm and learned to fix things — partly because his family didn’t have the money to pay someone else to do it. He also had a natural curiosity about anything related to science or engineering, and often took on small, non-farming projects, just to see if he could figure them out. Though farming taught him a lot about hard work and sharpened his mechanical acumen, he desired to pursue science beyond the farm. Iowa State College was nearby and, as a land-grant school, had a strong focus on both agriculture and science. Clifford enrolled as an electrical engineering major, but was soon captivated by the field of pure chemistry. He switched majors and his love for chemistry only grew from that point on.

While Clifford was an undergraduate, the U.S. entered World War II. When the Manhattan Project, the country’s secret, high-stakes effort to build an atom bomb, came calling, Clifford was recommended by his department head, and he became one of 25 undergraduate chemistry students chosen to serve as technicians under Dr. Franklin Spedding. Spedding specialized in rare earth elements (which are chemically similar to uranium), and the project he and his team worked on led to the development and purification of the uranium needed to create the fission bomb.

Though his war work delayed his graduation, Clifford still had enough free time to meet and court Kitty Carter. At that time, by all accounts, Clifford was known to be driven by two ideas – his love of chemistry and his desire to start his own company one day. To Kitty, a third driving idea became apparent that hinted at his upcoming marriage proposal – his desire to build that company in partnership with her. The two married in 1943 and started a family. Upon Clifford’s graduation in 1947 jobs were scarce, but he eventually found work in a water treatment plant. There he noticed that, though quantitative analysis methods at the time required time-intensive, skilled processes, the work being done at the treatment company seemed mostly nonscientific. He recognized an opportunity to both improve and simplify existing methods and, at the same time, fulfill his long-time goal of self-employment. With the help of Dr. Harvey Diehl, one of his Iowa State professors, Clifford developed the first pre-measured colorimetric water testing compound that could be used by technicians without any chemistry training. He began trying to sell his invention but, without a market for it, didn’t have a lot of success. Though busy raising their young children, Kitty took over sales and started what would now be called a direct mail campaign to market the testing kits. The kits became such a success that, once Clifford was able to sell his rights to a separate innovation he’d already patented, he and Kitty were able to buy a building and create their dream, the Hach Company.

Figure 1.The Hach Company’s classroom drinking water testing kit. Courtesy of the Science History Institute, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Kitty eventually acquired her pilot’s license and began flying all over the country to get the word out about the Hach Company’s new, simple water testing kits. She was a natural entrepreneur and her marketing efforts helped to build partnerships between the company and various water plant operators, resulting in further development of water standards and of simple kits to measure them. (Figure 1 shows a modern version of a Hach test kit that is adopted for classroom use.) By 1970, when the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was first established, the Hach Company was already manufacturing and selling over one hundred different portable water test kits —positioning the company to play an important role in helping to improve water quality throughout the country and eventually the world.

The Hach family mission

In 1982, 35 years after launching their company, Clifford and Kitty started the Hach Scientific Foundation (now known as the ACS-Hach Programs). As a way to give back to the field they loved and that had brought them great success, they originally established this philanthropic organization to encourage students to pursue chemistry studies in college.

In 2004, Clifford’s and Kitty’s grandson, Bryce, joined the foundation leadership. While surveying scholarship recipients, Bryce discovered that many of these undergraduate chemistry students cited their high school chemistry teachers as the inspiration for their interest in the subject.

Spurred by this revelation, in addition to his own experience as a high school science teacher, Bryce refined the foundation’s mission to focus on supporting educators of chemistry. The organization now supports current and future high school chemistry teachers, by providing grants to students, working chemists, and recent chemistry graduates who want to become high school chemistry teachers. In 2009, the foundation’s assets were transferred to the American Chemical Society to ensure the program’s sustained growth while continuing to honor the Hach family’s legacy.

ACS-Hach Programs

High school chemistry is the first introduction to the discipline for most students. In fact, for the majority of students, their first chemistry teacher shapes not only their understandings of the discipline, but also their visions of the possibilities that chemistry holds, both for their own careers and also for people around the world. What’s more, chemistry will influence the materials students touch, the healthcare they receive, and even the air they breathe.

Today, the ACS-Hach Programs support chemistry educators through a broad suite of scholarships and grants that address multiple dimensions of teacher preparation and classroom innovation. The ACS-Hach High School Chemistry Classroom Grant helps teachers acquire essential laboratory equipment, modern instructional materials, and hands‑on resources for their classrooms that bring chemistry to life for students. In addition, ACS-Hach Professional Development Grants provide opportunities for educators to not only strengthen their content knowledge, but also to engage in high‑quality professional learning experiences aligned with contemporary science education standards. Together with scholarship programs that support teacher credentialing and career transitions into chemistry education, these initiatives help ensure a well‑prepared, well‑resourced teaching workforce capable of delivering modern, inquiry‑driven chemistry instruction.

Teachers across the United States face resource gaps that impact the quality of STEM education, and often use their own money to purchase the classroom supplies they need. According to a 2025 DonorsChoose survey, teachers spent an average of $655 of their own money during the 2024–25 school year on basic materials to keep their classrooms functional. The survey also found that without external funding, teachers would likely be spending double that amount. This burden is exacerbated by rising prices and flat school budgets.

Access to meaningful STEM experiences can substantially influence students’ mastery of complex concepts and their long-term engagement in science learning. The ACS-Hach Programs are STEM grants created to strengthen the national landscape of high school chemistry education by offering meaningful financial support to both current and future teachers. Each year, the Hach programs award grants and scholarships to more than 200 aspiring and current high school chemistry teachers nationwide.

Program impacts

Figure 2. Students presenting chemistry topics to an audience after gaining experience through “Be the YouTuber.”

Many creative proposals for improving how students learn chemistry have been turned into reality through the ACS‑Hach High School Chemistry Classroom Grant. One was from Jason Just, a high school chemistry teacher in Lakeville, MN, who submitted a proposal called “Be the YouTuber,” to help students create and critique chemistry videos (Figure 2). Just used his grant funds to purchase a mobile screen monitor so his class could view the student-created videos together, increasing the collaborative value of the feedback sessions. The monitor allows the teacher and students to model experiments that can be played back later for not only their own class, but for their peers’ classes as well.

Today’s students are spending much of their free time on YouTube. From a survey conducted by the social media/commerce platform Whop, Fortune reported that 30% of 12-15 year-olds aspire to be YouTubers. Communicating chemistry concepts through a trending and accessible medium, like YouTube, allows students to engage more deeply. Students are excited to experience being an influencer through these classroom chemistry videos. Just’s program invites them to dive more deeply into their curriculum and take ownership of the material. They can also engage in the concepts presented by their peers more meaningfully than they could by watching an unknown content creator on YouTube. The program creates memorable experiences and helps to keep students engaged and excited about chemistry.

Teachers can also seek funding for professional development through the ACS-Hach Professional Development Grant. This grant supports opportunities such as attendance at science conferences, courses, workshops, or even research trips to bring to life real-world stories and experiences for their students to enrich their learning.

One grant recipient, high school chemistry teacher Jamie Lauer of Colgate, Wisconsin, used the funds to travel to Parguera, Puerto Rico to study the chemistry of urchin and coral reef restoration work (Figure 3) with the Center for Research and Restoration of Marine Organisms. Environmental lessons, such as the rise of CO₂ levels in the atmosphere and the correlated sinking pH levels in the ocean, can be particularly compelling as anxiety about environmental change is a growing concern for students.¹ By bringing water tanks into the classroom, Lauer shared her field work with her students through assigned labs accompanied by a firsthand account of the work. This provided a tangible, real-world connection to the curriculum as Lauer’s students have expanded and strengthened their laboratory skills through titrations, equipment maintenance, and salinity monitoring related to their teacher’s field experiences.

Thinking forward

If you or a colleague could benefit from a classroom or professional development grant, you are encouraged to apply for either the ACS-Hach High School Chemistry Grant (due June 1) or the ACS-Hach Professional Development Grant (due October 15). The grants can be used to enhance classroom learning, foster student development, and reveal the wonders of chemistry.

We can make the future better with the help of chemistry. Apply for an ACS-Hach Grant to further inspire young students with the wonder and opportunities of science!

References

¹Valero, M. Helping youth move from climate anxiety to climate action. Monitor on Psychology. 2025, 56, 4. Available at https://www.apa.org/monitor/2025/06/youth-climate-anxiety-action (accessed Apr 29, 2026).