We are pleased to announce that Prof. Jens K. Norskov of the Depart­ment of Chem­i­cal Engi­neer­ing and the SLAC Nation­al Accel­er­a­tor Lab­o­ra­to­ry at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty is the recip­i­ent of the 2013 Michel Boudart Award for the Advance­ment catal­y­sis. The Award is spon­sored by the Hal­dor Top­søe Com­pa­ny and is admin­is­tered joint­ly by the NACS and the EFCATS. More infor­ma­tion on this award and the award process can be found in the Awards fold­er of the NACS home page www.nacatsoc.org.

The Michel Boudart Award for the Advance­ment catal­y­sis is giv­en in recog­ni­tion of indi­vid­ual con­tri­bu­tions to the elu­ci­da­tion of the mech­a­nism and active sites involved in cat­alyt­ic phe­nom­e­na and to the devel­op­ment of new meth­ods or con­cepts that advance the under­stand­ing and/or prac­tice of het­ero­ge­neous catal­y­sis. The Award selec­tion process will empha­size accom­plish­ments and con­tri­bu­tions pub­lished with­in the five pre­ced­ing years.

The award rec­og­nizes Pro­fes­sor Jens K. Nork­skov for his pio­neer­ing work on under­stand­ing trends in cat­a­lyst activ­i­ty and devel­op­ing cat­a­lyst design prin­ci­ples based on reac­tiv­i­ty descrip­tors. He and his cowork­ers have con­tributed exten­sive­ly to the devel­op­ment of com­pu­ta­tion­al meth­ods and mod­els of sur­face reac­tiv­i­ty. Pro­fes­sor Norskov has intro­duced what is today a stan­dard mod­el of tran­si­tion met­al reac­tiv­i­ty and has used it to explain trends in adsorp­tion ener­gies and in the acti­va­tion ener­gies of ele­men­tary process­es on tran­si­tion met­al cat­a­lysts in terms of vari­a­tions in the d‑band cen­ter and oth­er para­me­ters char­ac­ter­iz­ing the prop­er­ties of sur­face elec­trons. Norskov has quan­ti­fied Brøn­st­ed-Evans-Polanyi (BEP) rela­tions and showed how they lead to pre­dic­tive mod­els that relate cat­alyt­ic reac­tiv­i­ty to adsorp­tion ener­gies of key rel­e­vant species. The meth­ods devel­oped for use in het­ero­ge­neous catal­y­sis have been suc­cess­ful­ly trans­ferred into the area of elec­tro­catal­y­sis. Most recent­ly, his research group has intro­duced the first data­base of sur­face chem­i­cal prop­er­ties and devel­oped pub­licly avail­able soft­ware to access and mine ther­mo­dy­nam­ic and cat­alyt­ic data on active sur­faces, thus open­ing nov­el oppor­tu­ni­ties for dis­cov­er­ing trends and for design­ing new cat­a­lysts and cat­alyt­ic process­es.

Pro­fes­sor Norskov will present ple­nary lec­tures at the 2013 meet­ings of the North Amer­i­can Catal­y­sis Soci­ety in Louisville and at the 2013 Europacat Meet­ing in Lyon.

Aveli­no Cor­ma
Pres­i­dent, Euro­pean Fed­er­a­tion of Catal­y­sis Soci­eties

Enrique Igle­sia
Pres­i­dent, North Amer­i­can Catal­y­sis Soci­ety