David West is the recipient of the 2026 F. G. Ciapetta Lectureship in Catalysis

I am pleased to announce that David West of SABIC is the recip­i­ent of the 2026 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.

David is a Cor­po­rate Fel­low at SABIC Tech­nol­o­gy and Inno­va­tion since 2012. Before join­ing SABIC, he worked at Dow for 31 years. While at SABIC he has focused most­ly on the devel­op­ment of advanced tech­nol­o­gy for hydro­car­bon pyrol­y­sis, and catal­y­sis and reac­tor tech­nol­o­gy for oxida­tive cou­pling of methane (OCM). Over the last decade, he pio­neered mul­ti­ple break­through projects for con­ver­sion of methane to eth­yl­ene (autother­mal oxida­tive cou­pling of methane, a scal­able reac­tor for com­bus­tion pyrol­y­sis of methane and con­ver­sion of com­plex hydro­car­bons to olefins). Under his lead­er­ship, the orga­ni­za­tion devel­oped five new tech­nolo­gies and prod­ucts that were grad­u­at­ed to the Strate­gic Busi­ness Units: ther­mo­plas­tic com­pos­ites, dielec­tric film, mixed plas­tic waste pyrol­y­sis, hydro­c­rack­ing of butane to ethylene/propene, and con­trolled release fer­til­iz­er. The first three are com­mer­cial; the third is com­plete and ready for deploy­ment, the last is still in devel­op­ment. His pio­neer­ing con­tri­bu­tions lie at the inter­sec­tion of the dis­ci­plines of catal­y­sis and reac­tion engi­neer­ing. He is co-inven­tor on 68 grant­ed patents includ­ing more than 50 in the area of OCM. He is a fel­low of the AIChE and mem­ber of the U.S. Nation­al Acad­e­my of Engineering.

Congratulations!

Javier Guzman
Pres­i­dent, North Amer­i­can Catal­y­sis Society