Dr. Alveda Williams

Dr. Alveda Williams is the chief inclusion officer at Dow. In this role, she is responsible for institutionalizing inclusion, diversity, and equity as key drivers for the company’s long-term growth and business success.

Prior to being named Chief Inclusion Officer, Dr. Williams served as Corporate Director of Inclusion and Senior HR Director for Talent Acquisition, where she was responsible for driving and implementing Dow’s global ID&E strategy, ensuring fair and equitable end-to-end talent acquisition processes, and embedding inclusion into the overall employee experience for breakthrough results. This included maximizing employee resource group engagement, diversifying Dow’s talent pipeline and supplier network, and driving efforts that enable a culture of inclusion for Dow’s employees, customers and communities. Under Alveda’s leadership, Dow has delivered meaningful progress on key inclusion and diversity performance indicators, ascended to the #3 spot on the Fair360 Top 50 Companies List, and was named one of the 2023 World’s Best Workplaces™  by Great Place to Work® and Fortune, a distinction only awarded to 25 companies.

Williams joined Dow in 2002 and has held a variety of leadership roles across research and development and human resources over her 20+ year career. She is the creator of Dow’s Building Engineering & Science Talent at Dow (BEST) Symposium, which introduces underrepresented minority Ph.D. talent to careers in industrial research. She serves on the Board of Directors for the Open Chemistry Collaborative in Diversity Equity (OXIDE), the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) Corporate Council, the Chief Diversity Officer Board for the Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4CP), and the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation Corporate Advisory Council.

Williams earned a Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry from Norfolk State University and a Ph.D. in materials chemistry from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She holds three patents and is the author of a number of internal and external publications, including a recent feature in Nature Chemistry magazine. She is the recipient of the NSBE Golden Torch Award for Corporate Diversity Leadership (2009), the prestigious Dow Transformation in Action Award (2012), the Council for Chemical Research Diversity Award (2013), Diversity Journal’s Women Worth Watching List (2014), and i4CP’s Board Member of the Year Award (2021).