Alveda Williams is Director of the Office of Inclusion and HR Director for Talent at Dow, where her profile reads as follows:

In her role as Director of Inclusion, she is responsible for driving and implementing the Company’s global inclusion strategy and institutionalizing inclusion into the overall employee experience for breakthrough results. This includes maximizing employee resource group engagement, diversifying Dow's supplier network and driving efforts that enable a culture of trust. Her role expanded in June 2019 to lead the Global Center of Expertise (COE) for Talent, which sets the best practices and governance for people practices associated with Talent Management, Learning, Succession Planning, Accelerated Careers, Leadership Development and Talent Acquisition.

Alveda joined Dow in Midland, MI in 2002 and began her career in Research and Development. She relocated to Freeport, TX and worked in Core R&D as an individual contributor and later as a people leader. Alveda made contributions to a number of technical projects including the development of VERSIFY™ based peelable seals, ACCELACURE™ pultrusion resin, and toughened epoxy resins for coatings and electrical laminates applications. In 2008, Alveda took a special assignment with the R&D Integration Team for the Rohm and Haas acquisition, where she led the effort to identify $30B in R&D growth synergy opportunities. In 2009, she was named Global Strategic University Leader for Dow’s R&D function. In this role, Alveda and her team hired close to 300 new PhD candidates over three seasons, and set a new standard for offer acceptance rate. In early 2012, Alveda was named Global HR Partner for Core R&D and in late 2013, she accepted the role of Associate HR Director for Dow’s largest integrated site, Texas Operations.

Alveda is the creator of Dow’s BEST (Building Engineering & Science Talent at Dow) Symposium which introduces under-represented minority Ph.D. talent to careers in industrial research. As a result of her leadership, she was awarded the NSBE Golden Torch Award for Corporate Diversity Leadership in 2009, the prestigious Dow Transformation in Action Award in 2012, the Council for Chemical Research Diversity Award in 2013, and she was named to the Diversity Journal’s 2014 Women Worth Watching List.

Alveda earned her B.S. in Chemistry from Norfolk State University (Norfolk, VA) in 1997 and Ph.D. in Materials Chemistry from University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign, IL) in 2002. She holds three patents and is the author of a number of external and internal publications.