Harold Kung to Receive Gabor A. Somorjai Award

Harold Kung, pro­fes­sor of chem­i­cal and bio­log­i­cal engi­neer­ing at North­west­ern Uni­ver­si­ty’s McCormick School of Engi­neer­ing and Applied Sci­ence, will receive the 2011 Gabor A. Somor­jai Award for Cre­ative Research in Catal­y­sis from the Amer­i­can Chem­i­cal Soci­ety.

The award rec­og­nizes out­stand­ing the­o­ret­i­cal, exper­i­men­tal, or devel­op­men­tal research result­ing in the advance­ment of under­stand­ing or appli­ca­tion of catal­y­sis, and the list of win­ners includes the great­est researchers in the field of catal­y­sis.

Kung is a world leader in the field of het­ero­ge­neous catal­y­sis research and the devel­op­ment of nov­el mate­ri­als and process­es. He applies his exper­tise to the crit­i­cal areas of sus­tain­abil­i­ty, renew­able ener­gy and envi­ron­men­tal chem­istry.

Cur­rent­ly Kung and his research group are focused on the syn­the­sis of nov­el nano­ma­te­ri­als for cat­alyt­ic appli­ca­tions to min­i­mize ener­gy con­sump­tion and envi­ron­men­tal impact and on new lithi­um-ion bat­tery tech­nolo­gies, such as new forms of elec­trodes for improved elec­tri­cal ener­gy stor­age.

Dur­ing his career Kung has made sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tions in var­i­ous areas of het­ero­ge­neous catal­y­sis, start­ing with sem­i­nal work that demon­strat­ed the rela­tion­ship between sur­face atom­ic struc­tures of an oxide and its chem­i­cal and cat­alyt­ic prop­er­ties. He has led the field in study­ing oxide-based cat­a­lysts for the removal of the atmos­pher­ic pol­lu­tant nitric oxide by reduc­tion with hydro­car­bons in an oxi­diz­ing atmos­phere. More recent­ly, Kung became the first to syn­the­size an inter­nal­ly func­tion­al­ized hol­low nanos­phere that can be used to trap and bind mol­e­cules and met­al com­plex­es.

The award will be pre­sent­ed at the spring meet­ing of the ACS in 2011.
 
This arti­cle was repro­duced from www.mccormick.northwestern.edu/news/articles/article_753.html.