I am pleased to announce that Dr. Sourav Sen­gup­ta of DuPont is the recip­i­ent of the 2022 F. G. Cia­pet­ta Lec­ture­ship in Catal­y­sis. The award is admin­is­tered by the North Amer­i­can Catal­y­sis Soci­ety and spon­sored by the W. R. Grace & Co. It is to be award­ed bien­ni­al­ly in even-num­bered years. The award con­sists of a plaque and an hon­o­rar­i­um of $5,000. The recip­i­ent may be invit­ed to lec­ture at some of the local catal­y­sis clubs dur­ing the two-year peri­od cov­ered by this award.

Dr. Sourav Sen­gup­ta, a DuPont Lau­re­ate, has been with DuPont for over 30 years. He has made numer­ous indus­tri­al­ly-impact­ful con­tri­bu­tions in cat­a­lyst syn­the­sis, reac­tion engi­neer­ing, and process devel­op­ment, rang­ing from gaso­line to advanced mate­ri­als. Through­out his career he has invent­ed, inno­vat­ed, and imple­ment­ed a pletho­ra of new process­es and prod­ucts includ­ing, a cheap­er and inher­ent­ly safer process for the syn­the­sis of an aramid monomer; a mod­u­lar, on-site and on-demand HCN man­u­fac­tur­ing process, using induc­tion heat­ing to direct­ly heat Pt-Rh gauze cat­a­lyst; a nov­el fixed bed hydro­gena­tion reac­tor tech­nol­o­gy to man­u­fac­ture a key inter­me­di­ate used in the syn­the­sis of an inhala­tion anes­thet­ic; and a high­er activ­i­ty sul­fu­ric acid cat­a­lyst. Sourav and his team have more recent­ly invent­ed bio­mass hydrodeoxy­gena­tion cat­a­lysts for con­vert­ing cel­lu­lose-derived mol­e­cules to alpha-omega diols by opti­miz­ing bicom­po­nent coop­er­a­tiv­i­ty in sur­face reac­tions and har­ness­ing the influ­ence of water to reduce acti­va­tion bar­ri­ers. They also resolved a chal­leng­ing cat­a­lyst deac­ti­va­tion prob­lem for furan hydro­gena­tion and improved cat­a­lyst pro­duc­tiv­i­ty in the Bio-THF process. A col­lab­o­ra­tive leader and a great team play­er, Sourav knows how to get results by solv­ing plant and process-relat­ed prob­lems, com­bin­ing an in-depth knowl­edge of the fun­da­men­tals of sci­ence with a keen sense of detail and a cre­ative approach to work.
 
Con­grat­u­la­tions!
 
Jing­guang Chen
Pres­i­dent, North Amer­i­can Catal­y­sis Soci­ety