I am pleased to announce that Pro­fes­sor Johannes Lercher of TU München and PNNL is the recip­i­ent of the 2023 Michel Boudart Award for the Advance­ment of Catal­y­sis. The Award is spon­sored by the Hal­dor Top­søe Com­pa­ny, and is admin­is­tered joint­ly by the North Amer­i­can Catal­y­sis Soci­ety and the Euro­pean Fed­er­a­tion of Catal­y­sis Soci­eties. It is award­ed bien­ni­al­ly in odd-num­bered years. Pro­fes­sor Lercher will give ple­nary lec­tures at the meet­ings of the North Amer­i­can Catal­y­sis Soci­ety (NAM) and the Euro­pean Fed­er­a­tion of Catal­y­sis Soci­eties (EuropaCat). The award con­sists of a plaque and a prize of $6,000. The plaque will be pre­sent­ed dur­ing the clos­ing ban­quet cer­e­monies at the 2023 North Amer­i­can Meet­ing of the Catal­y­sis Soci­ety (NAM28 in Prov­i­dence).

The Michel Boudart Award rec­og­nizes and encour­ages indi­vid­ual con­tri­bu­tions to the elu­ci­da­tion of the mech­a­nism and active sites involved in cat­alyt­ic phe­nom­e­na and to the devel­op­ment of new meth­ods or con­cepts that advance the under­stand­ing and/or prac­tice of het­ero­ge­neous catal­y­sis.

Pro­fes­sor Lercher is rec­og­nized for sem­i­nal con­tri­bu­tions to define and quan­ti­fy the cen­ters that bind react­ing mol­e­cules, to char­ac­ter­ize the envi­ron­ment around these cen­ters, and to quan­ti­fy the impact that the sol­id and/or mobile envi­ron­ment has on the react­ing mol­e­cules. Address­ing this com­plex­i­ty required pio­neer­ing work in char­ac­ter­iz­ing “simul­ta­ne­ous­ly” the sol­id as well as mobile phase under con­di­tions rel­e­vant for the cat­alyt­ic trans­for­ma­tion. The approach enabled, how­ev­er, to tie togeth­er under­stand­ing of the impact of liq­uid-sol­id inter­faces on the react­ing mol­e­cules and the addi­tion­al influ­ences by exter­nal elec­tric poten­tials. The pro­found analy­sis of the cat­alyt­ic phe­nom­e­na at the micro­scop­ic lev­el, study­ing the influ­ence of short- and long-range inter­ac­tions between the reac­tant mol­e­cules and the sol­id cat­a­lysts has strong­ly influ­enced our way to under­stand how reac­tions occur on sol­id cat­a­lysts. The holis­tic approach link­ing advanced physic­o­chem­i­cal char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of cat­a­lysts and their action with detailed kinet­ic analy­ses has opened a new par­a­digm to catal­y­sis research.

Please join me in con­grat­u­lat­ing Pro­fes­sor Lercher!
 
Jing­guang Chen
Pres­i­dent, North Amer­i­can Catal­y­sis Soci­ety