I am pleased to announce that Pro­fes­sor Yong Wang of the Wash­ing­ton State Uni­ver­si­ty and PNNL is the recip­i­ent of the 2025 Robert Bur­well Lec­ture­ship in Catal­y­sis, spon­sored by John­son Matthey and admin­is­tered by the North Amer­i­can Catal­y­sis Soci­ety. It is award­ed bien­ni­al­ly in odd-num­bered years. The award con­sists of a plaque and an hon­o­rar­i­um of $5,000, which will be pre­sent­ed at the award ban­quet at the NAM29 meet­ing. An addi­tion­al $4,500 is avail­able to cov­er trav­el­ling expens­es in North Amer­i­ca. The awardee is expect­ed to lec­ture at many of the local catal­y­sis clubs.

The Robert Bur­well Lec­ture­ship in Catal­y­sis is giv­en in recog­ni­tion of sub­stan­tial con­tri­bu­tions to one or more areas in the field of catal­y­sis with empha­sis on dis­cov­ery and under­stand­ing of cat­alyt­ic phe­nom­e­na, cat­alyt­ic reac­tion mech­a­nisms and iden­ti­fi­ca­tion and descrip­tion of cat­alyt­ic sites and species. The awardee is select­ed on the basis of his/her con­tri­bu­tions to the cat­alyt­ic lit­er­a­ture and the cur­rent time­li­ness of these research con­tri­bu­tions. The recip­i­ent may be invit­ed to (1) vis­it and lec­ture to each of the affil­i­at­ed Clubs/Societies with which mutu­al­ly sat­is­fac­to­ry arrange­ments can be made and (2) pre­pare a review paper(s) for pub­li­ca­tion cov­er­ing these lec­tures. Pub­li­ca­tion will be in an appro­pri­ate periodical. 

Prof. Yong Wang is rec­og­nized for his lead­er­ship in bridg­ing fun­da­men­tal sci­ence with sus­tain­able tech­nol­o­gy to tack­le crit­i­cal ener­gy, resource, and envi­ron­men­tal chal­lenges. His pio­neer­ing con­tri­bu­tions span cat­alyt­ic phe­nom­e­na, reac­tion mech­a­nisms, and active site char­ac­ter­i­za­tion, par­tic­u­lar­ly in renew­able bio­mass con­ver­sion. His research group has made ground­break­ing advance­ments in Lewis acid-base pairs on mixed met­al oxides, enabling the one-step con­ver­sion of bio-derived ethanol into longer-chain olefins. This inno­va­tion led to patent­ed cat­alyt­ic process­es for pro­duc­ing para-xylene and PET plas­tics entire­ly from renew­able bio­mass, trans­form­ing indus­tri­al prac­tices by replac­ing fos­sil feed­stocks. Recent­ly, his team and col­lab­o­ra­tors devel­oped a nov­el atom-trap­ping strat­e­gy to cre­ate high­ly sta­ble sin­gle-atom cat­a­lysts, max­i­miz­ing plat­inum group met­al (PGM) effi­cien­cy. They also uncov­ered key acti­va­tion prin­ci­ples for sin­gle-atom cat­a­lysts, sig­nif­i­cant­ly enhanc­ing reac­tiv­i­ty in three-way catal­y­sis and oxi­da­tion reac­tions. Addi­tion­al­ly, his dis­cov­er­ies in the dynam­ic and self-heal­ing behav­ior of sin­gle-atom Pd cat­a­lysts and oscil­la­to­ry behav­iors in Fis­ch­er-Trop­sch syn­the­sis are dri­ving advances in effi­cient fuel pro­duc­tion. Prof. Wang’s work in bimetal­lic catal­y­sis has also enabled hydro­gen pro­duc­tion from car­bon sources and hydrodeoxy­gena­tion of bio­mass. Through these break­throughs, Prof. Wang con­tin­ues to rede­fine cat­alyt­ic process­es, enabling more effi­cient chem­i­cal man­u­fac­tur­ing and ener­gy con­ver­sion technologies.
 
Congratulations!
 
Jing­guang Chen
Pres­i­dent, North Amer­i­can Catal­y­sis Society