I am pleased to announce that Dr. Javier Pérez-Ramírez of ETH Zurich is the recip­i­ent of the 2019 Paul H. Emmett Award in Fun­da­men­tal Catal­y­sis, spon­sored by W. R. Grace & Co. This prize is award­ed bien­ni­al­ly in odd-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. Dr. Pérez-Ramírez will present a Ple­nary Lec­ture at the 2019 North Amer­i­can Meet­ing of the Catal­y­sis Soci­ety (NAM26, in Chica­go).

The Paul H. Emmett Award in Fun­da­men­tal Catal­y­sis rec­og­nizes and encour­ages indi­vid­ual con­tri­bu­tions in the field of catal­y­sis with empha­sis on dis­cov­ery and under­stand­ing of cat­alyt­ic phe­nom­e­na, pro­pos­al of cat­alyt­ic reac­tion mech­a­nisms and iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of and descrip­tion of cat­alyt­ic sites and species.

The 2019 award rec­og­nizes Pro­fes­sor Pérez-Ramírez for sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tions to the design of cat­alyt­ic mate­ri­als and process con­cepts to solve ener­gy, resource, and envi­ron­men­tal chal­lenges of soci­ety at large. He has devel­oped cat­a­lysts that enable pio­neer­ing selec­tive routes for CO₂ hydro­gena­tion to methanol and halo­gen-medi­at­ed func­tion­al­iza­tion of nat­ur­al gas com­po­nents, as well as for con­ver­sion of renew­ables to chem­i­cal build­ing blocks. He has advanced tech­niques for nanos­truc­tur­ing of noble met­als in the form of defined ensem­bles or sin­gle atoms. This has enabled key sus­tain­abil­i­ty tar­gets, such as the avoid­ance of harm­ful mod­i­fiers for liq­uid-phase alkyne hydro­gena­tion. The thread of his research com­bines cre­ative dis­cov­ery with advanced struc­tur­al and mech­a­nis­tic under­stand­ing, empha­siz­ing the bridge between the mol­e­c­u­lar lev­el and appli­ca­tion at the tech­ni­cal scale.
 
Cita­tion:
For the design of inno­v­a­tive cat­alyt­ic process­es to address ener­gy, resource, and envi­ron­men­tal chal­lenges.
 
Christo­pher W. Jones
VP, North Amer­i­can Catal­y­sis Soci­ety