The following joint Editorial was originally published in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces (DOI: 10.1021/acsami.0c10979). We confront the terrible reality that systemic racism and discrimination impacts the daily personal and professional lives of many members of the scientific community and broader society. In the U.S., the brutal killing of George Floyd while in police custody is one of the most

Image courtesy of Jeremy Sale. Elizabeth Gillies received her Ph.D. (2004) at the University of California, Berkeley, working with Prof. Jean Fréchet on the application of dendrimers and other macromolecules for anticancer drug delivery. She then held a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship at the European Institute for Chemistry and Biology with Dr. Ivan Huc, researching helical oligoamide foldamers

This article is part of the Anselme Payen Award Special Issue special issue. Views expressed in this editorial are those of the authors and not necessarily the views of the ACS. This article references 24 other publications.

An NSF grant funding number was reported incorrectly in the originally published version of the manuscript. The corrected number (DMR-1720415) is provided in the revised Acknowledgments section, which is reproduced in its entirety below. Financial support for this work was provided by the National Science Foundation through a grant provided to the UW-Madison Materials Research Science and Engineering