One of AFRL’s chief scientists achieves honor Published Oct. 7, 2013 By Amy Rollins 88th Air Base Wing Skywrighter Staff WRIGHT-PATTERSON AIR FORCE BASE, Ohio -- Dr. Barry Farmer, chief scientist since 2002 of the Materials and Manufacturing Directorate, Air Force Research Laboratory, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, has been selected as a member of the 2013 class of Fellows of the American Chemical Society. Farmer was inducted during the ACS national meeting in Indianapolis Sept. 9. This particular fellowship recognizes both technical and volunteer contributions to ACS, Farmer said. "It's nice recognition," he added. Farmer attributes this recognition to his technical contributions in research applying computational modeling tools to understand the structures and properties of polymers, coupled with X-ray diffraction studies. His most significant volunteer service to the ACS community, he said, was his service as chair and alternate counselor of the Division of Polymer Chemistry, and as chair of the ACS central regional meeting held in Dayton in 2010. He has also organized several symposia in the polymers division and the Division of Polymeric Materials Science and Engineering. "One of the Materials and Manufacturing Directorate's primary initiatives these days is to bring computational tools into the materials science and engineering enterprise, integrating those with experiments with the objective of discovering, developing and being able to produce and sustain materials in much shorter timeframes than has historically been the case," Farmer said. "That's all part of President Obama's Materials Genome Initiative." Farmer worked in academia for 22 years and has been an Air Force senior scientist for 15 years.