I am pleased to announce that Dr. Hai-Ying Chen of John­son Matthey is the recip­i­ent of the 2019 Eugene J. Houdry Award in Applied Catal­y­sis spon­sored by Clari­ant.

The Eugene J. Houdry Award in Applied Catal­y­sis rec­og­nizes and encour­ages 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 appli­ca­tion. It is award­ed bien­ni­al­ly in odd-num­bered years. The award con­sists of a plaque and an hon­o­rar­i­um of $5,000. The plaque will be pre­sent­ed dur­ing the clos­ing ban­quet cer­e­monies at the 2019 North Amer­i­can Meet­ing of the Catal­y­sis Soci­ety (NAM26) in Chica­go. Dr. Chen will also present a Ple­nary Lec­ture at the 2019 North Amer­i­can Meet­ing of the Catal­y­sis Soci­ety in recog­ni­tion of this hon­or.

Dr. Chen is rec­og­nized for his out­stand­ing con­tri­bu­tions to advanc­ing the capa­bil­i­ties of cat­alyt­ic con­vert­ers for auto­mo­tive exhaust emis­sion con­trol – a field pio­neered by Eugene J. Houdry more than 60 years ago. Dr. Chen and his team at John­son Matthey have devel­oped and indus­tri­al­ized many inno­v­a­tive cat­a­lyst tech­nolo­gies for clean­ing air pol­lu­tants from exhaust emis­sions. These include the devel­op­ment of NOx adsor­ber cat­a­lysts for diesel pick­up trucks to meet strin­gent US EPA 2010 emis­sion stan­dards in 2007; the dis­cov­ery and com­mer­cial­iza­tion of a group of small-pore zeo­lite sup­port­ed Cu cat­a­lysts for the selec­tive cat­alyt­ic reduc­tion of NOx for heavy-duty diesel trucks to meet low NOx emis­sion reg­u­la­tions in 2010; and the most recent inven­tion of Pd-zeo­lite based diesel cold start con­cept cat­a­lysts that help fuel-effi­cient vehi­cles meet stricter future envi­ron­men­tal reg­u­la­tions. Mil­lions of emis­sion con­trol cat­a­lysts and sys­tems that con­tain the tech­nolo­gies devel­oped by Dr. Chen and his team have been installed on vehi­cles. This has result­ed in mil­lions of tons of reduc­tion in air pol­lu­tants, which sig­nif­i­cant­ly ben­e­fits our envi­ron­ment and soci­ety.

Dr. Chen received his Ph.D. in Chem­istry from Fudan Uni­ver­si­ty, Shang­hai, Chi­na. He con­duct­ed post­doc­tor­al research at North­west­ern Uni­ver­si­ty, Evanston, Illi­nois. He has pub­lished more than 60 tech­ni­cal papers and holds more than 140 grant­ed patents in var­i­ous juris­dic­tions around the world.
 
Cita­tion:
For out­stand­ing con­tri­bu­tions to advance­ments in cat­a­lyst tech­nolo­gies and sci­ence for diesel exhaust emis­sion con­trol.