ACS Catalysis Lectureship 2026 for the Advancement of Catalytic Science in Heterogeneous Catalysis

The ACS Catal­y­sis Lec­ture­ship for the Advance­ment of Cat­alyt­ic Sci­ence in Het­ero­ge­neous Catal­y­sis rec­og­nizes researchers hav­ing a recent, sig­nif­i­cant pub­li­ca­tion in ACS Catal­y­sis. This year’s win­ning paper, enti­tled CO Oxi­da­tion on Ir1/TiO2: Resolv­ing Lig­and Dynam­ics and Ele­men­tary Reac­tion Steps (ACS Catal. 2023, 13, 12, 7802–7811) was co-led by Pro­fes­sors Ayman M. Karim (Uni­ver­si­ty of Vir­ginia) and Hongliang Xin (Vir­ginia Tech) which reveals the com­plex­i­ty of CO oxi­da­tion mech­a­nism on TiO2-sup­port­ed Ir sin­gle atoms.

In their work, kinet­ic mea­sure­ments, operan­do spec­troscopy, and quan­tum-chem­i­cal cal­cu­la­tions showed that the reac­tion mech­a­nism has two kinet­i­cal­ly rel­e­vant steps, an O2 dis­so­ci­a­tion step and an Eley-Ride­al-type step where a gas phase CO reacts with an Ir com­plex hav­ing an unre­ac­tive CO bound lig­and. Their work showed the abil­i­ty to iden­ti­fy rate-con­trol­ling steps, iso­late spe­cif­ic reac­tion inter­me­di­ates and iden­ti­fy which lig­ands par­tic­i­pate in the reac­tion while oth­ers are spec­ta­tors, details which have been tra­di­tion­al­ly lim­it­ed to homo­ge­neous cat­a­lysts. Addi­tion­al infor­ma­tion about this work and the awardees can be found at ACS Catal­y­sis 2026 Lec­ture­ship and Award Winners.

Profs. Karim’s and Xin’s Lec­ture­ship will be cel­e­brat­ed dur­ing a sym­po­sium to be held as part of the Fall 2026 Amer­i­can Chem­i­cal Soci­ety Nation­al Meet­ing, Chica­go, August 23 — 27.