We are pleased to announce that Pro­fes­sor Christophe COPÉRET of the Depart­ment of Chem­istry and Applied Bio­sciences ETH Zürich is the recip­i­ent of the 2015 Paul H. Emmett Award in Fun­da­men­tal Catal­y­sis, spon­sored by the Grace Cat­a­lyst Tech­nolo­gies oper­at­ing seg­ment of W.R. Grace & Co. and admin­is­tered by The North Amer­i­can Catal­y­sis Soci­ety. The Award con­sists of a plaque and an hon­o­rar­i­um of $5,000. The plaque will be pre­sent­ed dur­ing the clos­ing ban­quet cer­e­monies at the 24th NAM meet­ing in Pitts­burgh. Pro­fes­sor COPÉRET will also present a ple­nary lec­ture dur­ing the con­fer­ence.

The Paul H. Emmett Award in Fun­da­men­tal Catal­y­sis is giv­en in recog­ni­tion of sub­stan­tial 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 award rec­og­nizes the con­tri­bu­tions of Pro­fes­sor Christophe COPÉRET to the prepa­ra­tion of well-defined het­ero­ge­neous cat­a­lysts through a mol­e­c­u­lar approach based on the con­trolled func­tion­al­iza­tion of sur­faces and the atom­ic descrip­tion of the sur­face species and active sites, in par­tic­u­lar via sol­id-state NMR spec­troscopy. This approach has allowed a detailed under­stand­ing of the struc­ture of active sites and of the reac­tion mech­a­nism of cat­alyt­ic process­es, such as olefin metathe­sis and poly­mer­iza­tion, there­by pro­vid­ing access to structure–activity rela­tion­ships and to ratio­nal cat­a­lyst design.
 
Enrique Igle­sia
Pres­i­dent, North Amer­i­can Catal­y­sis Soci­ety
 
Bruce R. Cook
Vice Pres­i­dent, North Amer­i­can Catal­y­sis Soci­ety