Spring 2026 Meeting of the New England Catalysis Society

The New Eng­land Catal­y­sis Soci­ety (NECS) held its Spring 2026 meet­ing at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Maine in Orono, ME on Fri­day, May 29th. Dur­ing this meet­ing, atten­dees heard fan­tas­tic talks high­light­ing the diverse per­spec­tives on catal­y­sis in New Eng­land from Profs. Rory Water­man of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ver­mont, Friederike Jentoft of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Massachusetts—Amherst, Andy Peter­son of Brown Uni­ver­si­ty, Julia Val­la of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Con­necti­cut, and Fan­glin Che of Worces­ter Poly­tech­nic Insti­tute. We addi­tion­al­ly wel­comed Prof. Aditya Bhan from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Min­neso­ta to share a keynote address on the roles of sur­face crowd­ing in hydro­gena­tion and oxi­da­tion catalysis.

 

We would fur­ther like to con­grat­u­late the 15 stu­dents who pre­sent­ed posters in our com­pe­ti­tion with three par­tic­u­lar­ly excel­lent con­tri­bu­tions from Joel Gravesande (1st place, U Maine, advi­sor: Tom Schwartz), Seth Drahusz (2nd place, UNH, advi­sor: Nan Yi), and Kirk Bad­ger (3rd place, Brown, advi­sor: Franklin Gold­smith). NECS would like to thank Profs. Tom Schwartz, Bri­an Fred­er­ick, and Heather LeClerc for their orga­ni­za­tion of this meet­ing, as well as the Maine Local Sec­tion of the Amer­i­can Chem­i­cal Soci­ety, Malvern Pan­a­lyt­i­cal, and Cell Press for their support.