I am pleased to announce that Dr. Paul Barg­er of UOP LLC, a Hon­ey­well Com­pa­ny, is the recip­i­ent of the F.G. Cia­pet­ta Lec­ture­ship in Catal­y­sis, spon­sored by the Grace Cat­a­lysts Tech­nolo­gies oper­at­ing seg­ment of W.R. Grace & Co. and the North Amer­i­can Catal­y­sis Soci­ety. The Award con­sists of a plaque and an hon­o­rar­i­um. The plaque will be pre­sent­ed dur­ing the clos­ing ban­quet cer­e­monies at the 2015 NAM in Pitts­burgh, PA. The recip­i­ent will present lec­tures at most of the affil­i­at­ed Clubs/Societies dur­ing the two-year peri­od cov­ered by this Lectureship. 

The Award is giv­en in recog­ni­tion of sub­stan­tial con­tri­bu­tions to one or more areas in the field of catal­y­sis with empha­sis on indus­tri­al­ly sig­nif­i­cant cat­a­lysts and cat­alyt­ic process­es and the dis­cov­ery of new cat­alyt­ic reac­tions and sys­tems of poten­tial indus­tri­al importance. 

Paul Barg­er has an estab­lished track record of cham­pi­oning new ideas and mov­ing them effec­tive­ly from eval­u­a­tion, to cat­a­lyst devel­op­ment, and to com­mer­cial­iza­tion. Over his thir­ty year career at UOP he has con­tributed to the dis­cov­ery of cat­alyt­ic phe­nom­e­na and devel­op­ment of sev­er­al cat­alyt­ic process­es of indus­tri­al sig­nif­i­cance. He has achieved this by sound tech­ni­cal insight, care­ful exper­i­men­tal design, and flaw­less exe­cu­tion as evi­denced by the award of more than 55 U.S. patents. 

Paul is specif­i­cal­ly rec­og­nized with the F.G Cia­pet­ta Lec­ture­ship for his con­tri­bu­tions to the devel­op­ment of the Methanol-to-Olefins (MTO) process from con­cept devel­op­ment to com­mer­cial offer­ing. He was a leader of the joint MTO devel­op­ment effort between UOP and Norsk Hydro. A series of dis­cov­er­ies of SAPO-34 struc­ture-func­tion rela­tion­ships, such as the cor­re­la­tions of prod­uct shape selec­tiv­i­ty, hydride trans­fer and cok­ing with acid site den­si­ty and crys­tal mor­phol­o­gy were keys in the devel­op­ment of this tech­nol­o­gy. The first of four UOP-licensed com­mer­cial units was suc­cess­ful­ly start­ed up in Sep­tem­ber 2013. Paul has also led the devel­op­ment and com­mer­cial­iza­tion of two naph­tha reform­ing cat­a­lysts and a sol­id acid deter­gent alky­la­tion cat­a­lyst and cur­rent­ly heads up UOP’s Proof-of-Prin­ci­ple Lab for the eval­u­a­tion of ideas for new tech­nol­o­gy opportunities.

I am delight­ed that the North Amer­i­can Catal­y­sis Soci­ety has cho­sen to rec­og­nize the con­tri­bu­tions of Dr. Paul Barg­er with this lec­ture­ship. I speak with the voice of our grate­ful com­mu­ni­ty in also thank­ing the man­age­ment of W.R. Grace& Co. for its con­tin­u­ing sup­port of this lectureship.
 
Enrique Igle­sia
Pres­i­dent, North Amer­i­can Catal­y­sis Society