Sandra C. Greer

Sandra Charlene Greer (born Sandra Charlene Thomason, 1945) is an American physical chemist who has held important academic and administrative positions at both the University of Maryland, College Park and Mills College. Her area of study is the thermodynamics of fluids, especially polymer solutions and phase transitions. She has received awards for her scientific contributions, and for her advocacy for women in science and her work on ethics in science. She held a number of administrative posts at Maryland, including serving as the first woman department chair of Chemistry and Biochemistry between 1990 and 1993. where she was the department's first tenured woman faculty member. She also developed a program of ethics courses for scientists, with the intention of teaching students "how to recognize an ethical dilemma when they see one, and how to think through it."

In 2008, Greer became provost and dean of the faculty at Mills College in Oakland, California, where she was also professor of chemistry and physics, and holder of the Scheffler Pre-Health Science Chair.

She has been committed throughout her career to ensuring that more women pursue a scientific career. At the national level, she helped to found the Committee for the Advancement of Women in the Chemical Sciences (COACh) in 1998.

"We grieve for the unrealized potential of all these women, and we weep for all the science that did not get done because these women were excluded—the questions not asked, the experiments not done, the papers not written, the students not mentored." Sandra Greer, 2014 the American Chemical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1994), and the Association for Women in Science. She is a fellow of the American Physical Society (1986) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Greer has received numerous awards.

She received the Award for Encouraging Women into Careers in the Chemical Sciences from the American Chemical Society in 2014.