Alexis T. Bell is the recipient of the 2018 NACS Award for Distinguished Service in the Advancement of Catalysis

I am pleased to announce that Prof. Alex­is T. Bell is the recip­i­ent of the 2018 NACS Award for Dis­tin­guished Ser­vice in the Advance­ment of Catal­y­sis. The award is co-spon­sored by Exxon­Mo­bil and Clari­ant. It is award­ed bien­ni­al­ly in even-num­bered years. The award con­sists of a plaque and an hon­o­rar­i­um of $5,000. The plaque will be pre­sent­ed dur­ing the clos­ing ban­quet cer­e­monies at the 2019 North Amer­i­can Meet­ing of the Catal­y­sis Soci­ety.

The NACS Award for Dis­tin­guished Ser­vice in the Advance­ment of Catal­y­sis is giv­en to a per­son who has advanced cat­alyt­ic chem­istry or engi­neer­ing by sig­nif­i­cant ser­vice to the catal­y­sis com­mu­ni­ty in addi­tion to their tech­ni­cal accom­plish­ments.

Alex Bell’s dis­tin­guished ser­vice to the catal­y­sis com­mu­ni­ty has sig­nif­i­cant­ly advanced the field through a wide vari­ety of lead­er­ship posi­tions. He has been the Edi­tor in Chief of Catal­y­sis Reviews – Sci­ence and Engi­neer­ing and Chem­i­cal Engi­neer­ing Sci­ence. In addi­tion, Alex has tak­en lead­er­ship roles that have great­ly impact­ed catal­y­sis. He was appoint­ed as Chair of a Pan­el on New Direc­tions in Cat­alyt­ic Sci­ence and Tech­nol­o­gy for the Nation­al Research Coun­cil from 1989–91. He orga­nized a work­shop on the sub­ject and led the writ­ing of a report enti­tled Catal­y­sis Looks to the Future. Oral pre­sen­ta­tions based on the report were made to House and Sen­ate com­mit­tees deal­ing with sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy. The find­ings of the report served to launch and strength­en research pro­grams in catal­y­sis in many parts of the world and pro­vid­ed direc­tion and sup­port­ing infor­ma­tion for many research pro­pos­als sub­mit­ted in the US. Alex has also served in lead­er­ship posi­tions for work­shops designed to help shape DOE pro­grams that impact catal­y­sis. In addi­tion to these spe­cial assign­ments Alex has also tak­en on lead­er­ship roles in the NACS and inter­na­tion­al catal­y­sis soci­eties. Alex estab­lished this record of ser­vice while advanc­ing the knowl­edge of catal­y­sis with the pub­li­ca­tion of over 700 tech­ni­cal pub­li­ca­tions, with an h‑index of 111. He has estab­lished lead­er­ship roles in mech­a­nis­tic stud­ies using vibra­tional spec­tro­scopies and kinet­ic analy­sis for a vari­ety of cat­alyt­ic reac­tions, and appli­ca­tions to catal­y­sis of the­o­ry rang­ing from mol­e­c­u­lar dynam­ics to bond order con­ser­va­tion meth­ods to den­si­ty func­tion­al the­o­ry. This most impres­sive body of work has been wide­ly rec­og­nized, includ­ing elec­tion to the Nation­al Acad­e­mies of both Engi­neer­ing and Sci­ence.

The time required for these tasks was sub­stan­tial, but the ben­e­fits to the catal­y­sis com­mu­ni­ty were huge and made pos­si­ble only by Alex’s unique com­bi­na­tion of skill and com­mit­ment. The com­mu­ni­ty is very thank­ful to Alex for these impor­tant con­tri­bu­tions.
 
Christo­pher W. Jones
VP, North Amer­i­can Catal­y­sis Soci­ety