Paul B. Weisz

Paul emi­grat­ed to the U.S. in 1939 from Berlin, inter­rupt­ing his grad­u­ate stud­ies in pre- World War II Ger­many to attend Auburn Uni­ver­si­ty where he com­plet­ed his B.S. degree in less than one year. Fol­low­ing his grad­u­a­tion, he worked as a researcher at the Bar­tol Research Foun­da­tion of the Franklin Insti­tute in Swarth­more, PA. He lat­er moved to the Mass­a­chu­setts Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy where, as an elec­tron­ics engi­neer, he par­tic­i­pat­ed in the devel­op­ment of LORAN, a long range radio sig­nal-based aid to nav­i­ga­tion.

Paul joined Mobil Research and Devel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion in 1946 as a Research Asso­ciate at Mobil’s Pauls­boro, NJ research lab­o­ra­to­ry. He pro­gressed through a num­ber of tech­ni­cal assign­ments, reach­ing the posi­tion of Senior Sci­en­tist, the high­est tech­ni­cal posi­tion in Mobil in 1961. He man­aged Mobil’s Explorato­ry Process Research orga­ni­za­tion from 1967 until 1969 and its Cen­tral Research Lab­o­ra­to­ry in Prince­ton, NJ from 1969 through 1982. Paul retired from Mobil in 1984.

Short­ly after join­ing Mobil, Paul became inter­est­ed in the sub­ject of dif­fu­sion and catal­y­sis. This was the foun­da­tion for a life­long inter­est in porous mate­ri­als as cat­a­lysts and specif­i­cal­ly in crys­talline hydrous alu­mi­nosil­i­cates known as zeo­lites. Along with sev­er­al Mobil col­lab­o­ra­tors, he pio­neered the use of nat­ur­al and syn­thet­ic zeo­lites as cat­a­lysts for petro­le­um refin­ing and petro­chem­i­cal man­u­fac­ture. These zeo­lite cat­a­lysts even­tu­al­ly rev­o­lu­tion­ized many refin­ing process­es because they facil­i­tat­ed only cer­tain reac­tions between mol­e­cules hav­ing spe­cif­ic dimen­sions.

In 1960, Paul pub­lished a ground-break­ing paper co-authored with Vince Frilette, anoth­er Mobil sci­en­tist. This became the foun­da­tion of “shape-selec­tive catal­y­sis” con­cept, and also one of Paul’s wide­ly cit­ed papers (J. Phys. Chem., 64, 382 (1960)). Process­es based on Paul’s con­cept of shape-selec­tive catal­y­sis were first com­mer­cial­ized in the ear­ly 1960’s. Through­out the 1970’s and 1980’s Paul was close­ly asso­ci­at­ed with Mobil’s devel­op­ment of new cat­alyt­ic mate­ri­als and the process­es that were devel­oped around them.

While work­ing at Mobil, Paul took a sab­bat­i­cal in 1964 to earn his doc­tor­al degree from the Eidgenos­sis­che Tech­nis­che Hochschule (ETH) in Zurich, Switzer­land in 1966. His doc­tor­al research the­sis was based on an analy­sis of the per­me­ation of dyes into fibers. His analy­sis was the foun­da­tion for some of the fun­da­men­tal laws asso­ci­at­ed with dif­fu­sion of dye mol­e­cules into fibers.

One of Paul’s for­mi­da­ble strengths was his abil­i­ty to com­mu­ni­cate com­plex the­o­ries suc­cinct­ly. He was a con­stant con­trib­u­tor to the ACS pub­li­ca­tion ChemTech through­out the 70’s and 80’s where he con­tin­ued to enlight­en and delight read­ers with his insight­ful obser­va­tions of how phe­nom­e­na like dif­fu­sion and kinet­ics applied to every­day life.

His 1962 arti­cle with J. S. Hicks, enti­tled “The Behav­ior of Porous Cat­a­lyst Par­ti­cles in View of Inter­nal Mass and Heat Dif­fu­sion Effects,” Chem. Eng. Sci. 17, 265 (1962) was select­ed as one of the 50 most influ­en­tial arti­cles in Chem­i­cal Engi­neer­ing Sci­ence in the publication’s 1995 “Fron­tiers in Chem­i­cal Engi­neer­ing Sci­ence” com­mem­o­ra­tive edi­tion.

After he retired from Mobil in 1984, he began a third, high­ly pro­duc­tive career, apply­ing chem­i­cal and phys­i­cal prin­ci­ples to bio­med­ical research first at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia an then at Penn State. Work­ing with Dr. Madeleine Jouille at U. Penn he syn­the­sized mol­e­cules that mim­ic some of the heal­ing prop­er­ties of heparin, but that do not exhib­it heparin’s poten­tial­ly dan­ger­ous side effects.

For his numer­ous indus­tri­al research accom­plish­ments and con­tri­bu­tions to the sci­ence of catal­y­sis, Paul earned many awards includ­ing: The E. V. Mur­phree Award in Indus­tri­al Chem­istry from the Amer­i­can Chem­i­cal Soci­ety (1972), The Pio­neer Award from the Amer­i­can Insti­tute of Chemists (1974), The Leo Friend Award of the Amer­i­can Chem­i­cal Soci­ety (1977), the R. H. Wil­helm Award from the Amer­i­can Insti­tute of Chem­i­cal Engi­neers (1978), the Lavosier Medal from the Soci­ete Chemique de France (1983), The Lang­muir Dis­tin­guished Lec­tur­er Award from the Amer­i­can Chem­i­cal Soci­ety (1983), the Perkin Medal, from the Amer­i­can Sec­tion of the Soci­ety of Chem­i­cal Indus­try (1985), The Carothers Award from the Amer­i­can Chem­i­cal Soci­ety (1987), and the Nation­al Medal of Tech­nol­o­gy from Pres­i­dent George H. Bush in 1992. He was elect­ed to the Nation­al Acad­e­my of Engi­neer­ing, one of the high­est hon­ors for an engi­neer, in 1977 and received an Hon­orary Doc­tor­ate (Sc.D. in tech­no­log­i­cal sci­ence) from the Swiss Fed­er­al Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy in 1980.

Begin­ning in the ear­ly 1950’s Paul’s work at Mobil Oil with col­lab­o­ra­tors includ­ing N. Y. Chen, Vince Frilette, John McCul­lough, Dwight Prater, Jack Wise, Al Schwartz, Heinz Heine­man, Fritz Smith, and oth­ers helped set the foun­da­tions for zeo­lite catal­y­sis. His sem­i­nal work in the use of nat­ur­al zeo­lites as high­ly shape-selec­tive con­ver­sion cat­a­lysts set the stage for 50+ years of high­ly pro­duc­tive process research and rev­o­lu­tion­ized the refin­ing and petro­chem­i­cal indus­tries. Paul’s nine­ty-one issued U.S. patents and more than 180 jour­nal pub­li­ca­tions cov­er top­ics rang­ing from car­bona­ceous deposits on cat­a­lysts to chem­i­cal agents that impact the dif­fu­sion of drugs in human cells. Paul Weisz leaves behind a very rich sci­en­tif­ic and tech­ni­cal lega­cy that has great­ly impact­ed our aca­d­e­m­ic and indus­tri­al catal­y­sis research com­mu­ni­ties. His work con­tin­ues to inspire chemists and chem­i­cal engi­neers work­ing in the area of catal­y­sis and bio­ma­te­ri­als.
 
(Con­tributed by Thomas Deg­nan, Jose’ Santi­este­ban, and Dominick Maz­zone)

Pro­fes­sor José M. Par­era

Pro­fes­sor José M. Par­era was born in Argenti­na in 1930. He grad­u­at­ed as Chem­i­cal Engi­neer at the School of Chem­i­cal Engi­neer­ing, Uni­ver­si­dad Nacional del Litoral (UNL) in San­ta Fe, Argenti­na in 1958 as the top-ranked grad­u­ate of the Depart­ment. He was then grant­ed a Nation­al Research Coun­cil (CONICET) schol­ar­ship to study at Impe­r­i­al Col­lege in Lon­don, where he start­ed his work on het­ero­ge­neous catal­y­sis.

In his long, fruit­ful career, he was Founder and Direc­tor of Insti­tute of Catal­y­sis and Petro­chem­istry (INCAPE) of San­ta Fe, Argenti­na and a pio­neer through­out Latin Amer­i­ca in teach­ing and research in the field of het­ero­ge­neous catal­y­sis. He served as a mem­ber of the Edi­to­r­i­al Board of sev­er­al inter­na­tion­al jour­nals in that field, such as Catal­y­sis Reviews Sci­ence and Engi­neer­ing, Applied Catal­y­sis, Latin Amer­i­can Applied Research and Jour­nal of Chem­i­cal Tech­nol­o­gy and Biotech­nol­o­gy. He received many awards and retired as Hon­orary Pro­fes­sor of the Uni­ver­si­dad Nacional del Litoral.

Michel Boudart, chem­i­cal engi­neer and expert in catal­y­sis, dies at 87 Pro­fes­sor Boudart taught at Prince­ton and Berke­ley but was best known for his five decades at the heart of the Depart­ment of Chem­i­cal Engi­neer­ing at Stan­ford. His influ­ence shaped catal­y­sis dur­ing the post-­-war peri­od when ener­gy, defense and space indus­tries demand­ed a deep­er under­stand­ing of chem­i­cal reac­tions.
 
By Andrew Myers
 
Michel Boudart, a pro­fes­sor emer­i­tus of chem­i­cal engi­neer­ing at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty and for five decades one of the world’s lead­ing experts in catal­y­sis, died May 2 at an assist­ed liv­ing cen­ter in Palo Alto, Cal­i­for­nia, of mul­ti­ple organ fail­ure. He was 87.

Boudart was the first William M. Keck, Sr. Pro­fes­sor of Chem­i­cal Engi­neer­ing and one of a very few indi­vid­u­als who were respon­si­ble for estab­lish­ing the rep­u­ta­tion of Stanford’s chem­i­cal engi­neer­ing depart­ment. The cen­tral theme of his research was the cat­alyt­ic prop­er­ties of met­als, par­tic­u­lar­ly small met­al par­ti­cles.

Boudart essen­tial­ly brought catal­y­sis, as a sci­ence, to chem­i­cal engi­neer­ing in the Unit­ed States. He was an inter­na­tion­al ambas­sador for the field over his entire career.

“Michel Boudart was a world renowned and influ­en­tial expert in the field of catal­y­sis who brought the Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty chem­i­cal engi­neer­ing to promi­nence and trained sev­er­al decades of stu­dents,” said Andreas Acrivos, a fel­low pro­fes­sor at Stan­ford and now pro­fes­sor emer­i­tus both at Stan­ford and at the City Col­lege of CUNY. “He left a lega­cy that would be dif­fi­cult to repli­cate.”

As a pro­fes­sor, Boudart super­vised what was con­sis­tent­ly one of the larg­er groups of PhD can­di­dates in the depart­ment, even­tu­al­ly guid­ing over 70 doc­tor­al can­di­dates to their degrees and men­tor­ing over 100 post-­-doc­tor­al can­di­dates and vis­it­ing sci­en­tists. The dias­po­ra of his for­mer stu­dents would go on to lead and shape the field.

Le plus de saveur

 
An avid inter­na­tion­al trav­eller, Boudart and his wife, Mari­na, boast­ed friends across the world. His office sport­ed Japan­ese sho­ji screens, abstract prints, and over­stuffed sofas and – occu­py­ing one entire wall – an immense peri­od­ic table of the ele­ments, print­ed in Russ­ian, which he read with ease.

In a brief biog­ra­phy, Boudart cit­ed as his per­son­al phi­los­o­phy a quote from French lit­er­ary the­o­rist Roland Barthes: “Nul pou­voir, un peu de savoir, un peu de sagesse, et le plus de saveur pos­si­ble.” Trans­lat­ed loose­ly, it reads: “No pow­er, a lit­tle knowl­edge, a lit­tle wis­dom, and as much fla­vor as pos­si­ble.” In this con­text, he will always be remem­bered as a man of real per­son­al charis­ma and, one of the last “gen­tle­man sci­en­tists.”

Catal­y­sis is the study of chem­i­cal process­es by which one sub­stance, the cat­a­lyst, pro­motes a reac­tion between oth­er sub­stances with­out itself chang­ing.
It is fun­da­men­tal to the chem­i­cal, petro­le­um and phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal indus­tries, among many oth­ers.

In the post-­-war era, the Unit­ed States became the acknowl­edged leader in the field, most­ly owing to advances flow­ing out of Amer­i­can acad­e­mia and indus­try. Boudart was at the cen­ter of it all. He was an unabashed cham­pi­on of catal­y­sis. Though the field is obscure to most lay audi­ences, catal­y­sis has a pro­found impact on our world and how we live.

In a pub­lished inter­view, Boudart once laid out his case: With­out catal­y­sis, he said, “[o]ur satel­lites could not be maneu­vered, our autos would pour out all the nox­ious chem­i­cals we’ve spent years guard­ing against. Our tele­phone links with the rest of the world would be seri­ous­ly imped­ed.”

In 1975, in the wake of the first oil cri­sis, Boudart and two asso­ciates found­ed Cat­alyt­i­ca in San­ta Clara, Cal­i­for­nia, which worked on high­ly com­plex cat­alyt­ic prob­lems for petro­chem­i­cal, chem­i­cal, and phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal firms as well as gov­ern­ment agen­cies. He served as a con­sul­tant to numer­ous well-­-known com­pa­nies.

“[Cat­alyt­i­ca] start­ed in the catal­y­sis con­sult­ing field, a ser­vice made clear­ly nec­es­sary by the oil cri­sis,” Boudart said at the time. “One of the crit­i­cal areas was in syn­thet­ic fuels.”

Guid­ing force
Acco­lades and awards were show­ered on Boudart through­out his life, but par­tic­u­lar­ly in the lat­er years of his career, when the scale of his impact became clear.

In 1985, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Utah host­ed a five-­-day sym­po­sium on catal­y­sis sole­ly in Boudart’s hon­or. In 2004, the Jour­nal of Phys­i­cal Chem­istry ded­i­cat­ed an entire issue to Boudart’s lega­cy.

In their intro­duc­tion, the journal’s edi­tors wrote, “Michel Boudart has been the guid­ing force in the field of het­ero­ge­neous catal­y­sis for more than forty years. He was known for ele­gant­ly stat­ed con­cepts and his elu­ci­da­tion of cat­alyt­ic sites, his exper­i­men­tal stud­ies of new cat­alyt­ic mate­ri­als, and the activ­i­ties of [his] many stu­dents and col­lab­o­ra­tors …”

The jour­nal cit­ed his fore­most achieve­ment as the quan­tifi­ca­tion of catal­y­sis as rig­or­ous sequences of ele­men­tary steps. He focused atten­tion on the need to report reac­tion rates eval­u­at­ed under the most rig­or­ous assess­ment tech­niques avail­able and he intro­duced the con­cept of turnover rate – the num­ber of mol­e­cules con­vert­ed per site per sec­ond. He then per­fect­ed pre­cise pro­to­cols for accu­rate mea­sure­ment of reac­tions.

Boudart’s insis­tence on rig­or­ous col­lec­tion and report­ing of data proved invalu­able in com­par­ing data gen­er­at­ed by dif­fer­ent lab­o­ra­to­ries through­out the world and enabled many sub­se­quent advances in the field. His vision, lead­er­ship, and wis­dom were cred­it­ed as a major force in bring­ing catal­y­sis to a point where the design of spe­cif­ic cat­alyt­ic mate­ri­als for envi­ron­men­tal pro­tec­tion, pro­duc­tion of chem­i­cals, and ener­gy con­ver­sion process­es became pos­si­ble.

In 2006, the Dan­ish com­pa­ny Hal­dor Top­søe spon­sored The Michel Boudart Award for the Advance­ment of Catal­y­sis, which is admin­is­tered joint­ly by the North Amer­i­can Catal­y­sis Soci­ety and the Euro­pean Fed­er­a­tion of Catal­y­sis Soci­eties.

Profound legacy

 
Michel Boudart was born on 18 June 1924 in Brus­sels, Bel­gium. In 1940, as Hitler’s Panz­er divi­sions blitzkrieged his home­land, Boudart was just 16. He had been accept­ed to the Uni­ver­si­ty of Lou­vain, but the uni­ver­si­ty was closed due to the war.

In order not to be draft­ed or sent to Ger­man fac­to­ries, Boudart worked as a vol­un­teer stretch­er-­-bear­er for the Red Cross. Mean­while, he had pri­vate tutor­ing to pre­pare for Lou­vain. When the uni­ver­si­ty reopened, Boudart grad­u­at­ed in three years at the top of every class, save math­e­mat­ics, where he was out­done only by his dear friend, the late Pro­fes­sor Rene de Voge­laere of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Berke­ley.

Boudart earned his B.S. at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Lou­vain in 1944 and his M.S. in 1947. He then left Bel­gium to attend Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty, where he took his PhD in chem­istry in 1950. “He and his wife Mari­na were born in Bel­gium and were knight­ed by the crown, but Amer­i­ca was their adopt­ed home,” said Acrivos. “Their chil­dren are thor­ough­ly Amer­i­can.”

After earn­ing his doc­tor­ate, Boudart held fac­ul­ty posi­tions at Prince­ton until 1961 and, for three years, at Berke­ley, before join­ing the Stan­ford fac­ul­ty in 1964. He was Chair of the Depart­ment of Chem­i­cal Engi­neer­ing at Stan­ford from 1975 to 1978. He also held vis­it­ing pro­fes­sor­ships at the Uni­ver­si­ties of Lou­vain, Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo, and Paris. He became pro­fes­sor emer­i­tus in 1994.

Boudart authored or coau­thored over 280 jour­nal arti­cles and served on the edi­to­r­i­al boards of at least ten jour­nals. His book, Kinet­ics of Chem­i­cal Process­es, is a stan­dard ref­er­ence and was trans­lat­ed into Japan­ese, Span­ish, and French. His book, Kinet­ics of Het­ero­ge­neous Cat­alyt­ic Process­es, writ­ten with G. Dje­ga-­-Mari­adas­sou, was pub­lished in French in 1982 and trans­lat­ed to Eng­lish in 1984. He was coed­i­tor-­- in-­-chief of Catal­y­sis Sci­ence and Engi­neer­ing, a series of twelve vol­umes.

Boudart was recip­i­ent of numer­ous awards, among them the Wil­helm Award in Chem­i­cal Reac­tion Engi­neer­ing from the Amer­i­can Insti­tute of Chem­i­cal Engi­neers (1974), the Kendall Award (1977) and the Mur­phee Award (1985) from the Amer­i­can Chem­i­cal Soci­ety, and the Chem­i­cal Pio­neer Award (1991) of the Amer­i­can Insti­tute of Chemists.

His elec­tion to both the Nation­al Acad­e­my of Sci­ence and the Nation­al Acad­e­my of Engi­neer­ing were reflec­tions of Boudart’s lead­er­ship and his sci­en­tif­ic grav­i­tas. He was like­wise a Fel­low of the Amer­i­can Asso­ci­a­tion for the Advance­ment of Sci­ence, the Amer­i­can Acad­e­my of Arts and Sci­ences, and the Cal­i­for­nia Acad­e­my of Sci­ences. He was a for­eign mem­ber of the Acad­e­mia Royale des Sci­ences, des Let­tres et des Beaux-­-Arts de Bel­gique and its Roy­al Bel­gian Acad­e­my Coun­cil for Applied Sci­ences.

Boudart received hon­orary doc­tor­ates from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Liege, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Notre Dame, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ghent, and the Insti­tut Nation­al Poly­tech­nique de Lor­raine.

He held four patents

 
Boudart is sur­vived by a daugh­ter, Iris Har­ris, of Whit­ti­er, Calif.; three sons, Marc, of Aptos, Calif.; Bau­douin, of Ather­ton, Calif; and Philip, of Palo Alto; and grand­chil­dren Mari­na and Clint Har­ris; and Jesse, Louise, and Noel­la Boudart. His wife, Mari­na d’Haese Boudart, died in 2009. A sec­ond daugh­ter, Dominique, died in child­hood.
 
Down­load PDF doc­u­ment: Michel Boudart Obit­u­ary