I am pleased to announce that Dr. Alek­sey Yez­erets of Cum­mins is the recip­i­ent of the 2024 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.

Over his career at Cum­mins, Dr. Yez­erets has pro­vid­ed crit­i­cal con­tri­bu­tions to sev­er­al gen­er­a­tions of nov­el and first-to-mar­ket cat­alyt­ic tech­nolo­gies that are reduc­ing emis­sions in mil­lions of com­mer­cial vehi­cles world­wide. Every sys­tem rep­re­sents a tran­sient­ly oper­at­ed chem­i­cal plant that includes mul­ti­ple cat­alyt­ic reac­tors, sen­sors, and actu­a­tors, direct­ed by com­plex con­trol and diag­nos­tic sys­tems. Dr. Yez­erets and his team have focused their research on the under­stand­ing and advance­ment of the real-world per­for­mance, degra­da­tion, and recov­ery mech­a­nisms of NOx Stor­age and Reduc­tion, Selec­tive Cat­alyt­ic Reduc­tion, Methane-based three-way cat­a­lysts, and many aux­il­iary tech­nolo­gies. The result­ing cat­a­lyst oper­a­tion, regen­er­a­tion meth­ods, mod­els, diag­nos­tics, and con­trol algo­rithms have proven key to emis­sion com­pli­ance span­ning many years in the field, even at ele­vat­ed lev­els of con­t­a­m­i­nants often encoun­tered in glob­al appli­ca­tions. The hall­mark of Dr. Yez­erets’ research career has been his abil­i­ty to devel­op best-in-class applied sci­ence teams, and to build indus­tri­al, aca­d­e­m­ic, and nation­al lab part­ner­ships that address top­ics of a fun­da­men­tal nature to advance appli­ca­tion goals. He has impact­ed the broad­er field of catal­y­sis through an out­stand­ing record of pub­li­ca­tions, patents, and men­tor­ship. Today Dr. Yez­erets is expand­ing upon these achieve­ments by con­tribut­ing to indus­try decar­boniza­tion via elec­tri­fied, hydro­gen-pow­ered, and relat­ed tech­nolo­gies.
 
Con­grat­u­la­tions!
 
Jing­guang Chen
Pres­i­dent, North Amer­i­can Catal­y­sis Soci­ety