The Catal­y­sis Soci­ety of Met­ro­pol­i­tan New York is pleased to announce that Pro­fes­sor Fabio Ribeiro of Pur­due Uni­ver­si­ty is the 2005 recip­i­ent of the Soci­ety’s Excel­lence in Catal­y­sis Award, spon­sored by Exxon­Mo­bil Research and Engi­neer­ing Com­pa­ny. Pro­fes­sor Ribeiro is being rec­og­nized for his cre­ativ­i­ty and out­stand­ing accom­plish­ments in the field of het­ero­ge­neous catal­y­sis. His work is broad­ly rec­og­nized and char­ac­ter­ized by com­plete atten­tion to detail, and care­ful exper­i­men­tal design to pre­cise­ly answer impor­tant ques­tions in catal­y­sis. This award rec­og­nizes Pro­fes­sor Ribeiro for his use of the com­bi­na­tion of struc­tur­al char­ac­ter­i­za­tion, chem­i­cal kinet­ics, and ab ini­tio cal­cu­la­tions to under­stand cat­alyt­ic sys­tems at a fun­da­men­tal lev­el. Pro­fes­sor Ribeiro’s career is marked by suc­cess and achieve­ment at every stage includ­ing grad­u­ate and post grad­u­ate stud­ies with Michel Boudart and Gabor Somor­jai, indus­tri­al research at Cat­alyt­i­ca Incor­po­rat­ed, and fac­ul­ty appoint­ments at Worces­ter Poly­tech­nic and Pur­due­U­ni­ver­si­ty. In a rel­a­tive­ly short peri­od of time, Pro­fes­sor Ribeiro has pro­vid­ed key insights into numer­ous impor­tant and diverse cat­alyt­ic sys­tems, such as cat­alyt­ic com­bus­tion, hydrodechlo­ri­na­tion, hydro­car­bon rearrange­ment on alloy sur­faces, and prop­er­ties of oxy­gen-mod­i­fied tran­si­tion met­al car­bides.