I am pleased to announce that Dr. Deng-Yang (DY) Jan of the Hon­ey­well UOP is the recip­i­ent of the 2021 Eugene J. Houdry Award in Applied Catal­y­sis. This award is spon­sored by Clari­ant and is admin­is­tered by the North Amer­i­can Catal­y­sis Soci­ety. The award con­sists of a plaque and a prize of $5,000. The plaque will be pre­sent­ed dur­ing the clos­ing ban­quet cer­e­monies at the 2021 North Amer­i­can Meet­ing of the Catal­y­sis Soci­ety (NAM27 in New York City). 

The pur­pose of the Eugene J. Houdry Award is to rec­og­nize and encour­age indi­vid­ual con­tri­bu­tions in the field of catal­y­sis with empha­sis on the devel­op­ment of new and improved cat­a­lysts and process­es rep­re­sent­ing out­stand­ing advances in their use­ful applications. 

Dr. Jan’s tech­ni­cal focus is devel­op­ing plat­form knowl­edge and intro­duc­ing enabling con­cepts to devel­op future gen­er­a­tion prod­ucts and process­es in Aro­mat­ics & Deriv­a­tives, and Olefins & Deter­gents. Since 2000, Dr. Jan and Team UOP have been focus­ing on zeolitic catal­y­sis by apply­ing UOP Zeolitic Mate­r­i­al plat­form to the tech­nol­o­gy port­fo­lio includ­ing aro­mat­ics alky­la­tion, iso­mer­iza­tion, trans-alky­la­tion, new routes for pro­duc­ing para-xylene, eth­yl­ben­zene, cumene, lin­ear alkyl­ben­zene and motor fuel. DY achieve­ments include com­mer­cial­ize high­ly selec­tive cumene alky­la­tion (UOP Q‑Max) with low cap­i­tal and oper­at­ing costs, lin­ear alkyl­ben­zene (UOP Detal for biodegrad­able deter­gent) at low util­i­ty cost enabling replace HF alky­la­tion, Aro­mat­ics Iso­mer­iza­tion (UOP Iso­mar), Aro­mat­ics Trans-Alky­la­tion (UOP Tatoray) enabling flex­i­ble process of feed­stock of vary­ing compositions.

Dr. Jan received B.S. in Chem­istry from Nation­al Cheng-Kung Uni­ver­si­ty, M.S. in Inor­gan­ic Chem­istry in Nation­al Tsinghua Uni­ver­si­ty (Tai­wan) and a Ph.D. in Chem­istry from The Ohio State Uni­ver­si­ty in 1985. He has over 100 issued US patents and 30 peer review jour­nal pub­li­ca­tions. Dr. Jan has been rec­og­nized with sev­er­al awards, includ­ing the the 2007 Hon­ey­well Fun­da­men­tal Tech­nol­o­gy Devel­op­ment Award, the 2016 Her­man Pines Award for his con­tri­bu­tion to com­mer­cial­iz­ing EB/Cumene and Deter­gent, and the 2017 Hon­ey­well Dis­tin­guished Tech­nol­o­gy Award giv­en for out­stand­ing tech­ni­cal con­tri­bu­tions over the course of a career.

 
Jing­guang Chen
Pres­i­dent, North Amer­i­can Catal­y­sis Society