[2] Seeman worked at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland on a fellowship, before joining the Philip Morris Research Center in Richmond, Virginia.
[2] A sabbatical year at the Dyson Perrins Laboratory at Oxford University in 1983-1984 inspired Seeman's interest in the history of organic chemistry, and the beginning of his second career.
Between 1990 and 1997 Seeman proposed and edited 20 volumes of autobiographies of organic chemists, published by the American Chemical Society and Oxford University Press under the series title Profiles, Pathways and Dreams.
[7][2][8] The series contains autobiographies of Arthur Birch, Andrew Streitweiser, Bruce Merrifield, Carl Djerassi, Ernest Eliel and Koji Nakanishi, among others, with the goal of portraying "science as a human endeavor".
[19][20][21][22] Seeman has been active on the advisory board of The Journal of Organic Chemistry,[23] and of Accountability in Research, and was the guest editor of their edition on Ethics and Responsible Conduct.
[27][28][8] The Archimedes Initiative, which focused on students involved in high school science fairs, received a Camille & Henry Dreyfus Foundation award in 2009.