I am pleased to announce that Pro­fes­sor Christo­pher W. Jones of the School of Chem­i­cal and Bio­mol­e­c­u­lar Engi­neer­ing at the Geor­gia Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy is the recip­i­ent of the 2013 Paul H. Emmett Award in Fun­da­men­tal Catal­y­sis, spon­sored by the Grace Cat­a­lyst Tech­nolo­gies oper­at­ing seg­ment of W.R. Grace & Co. and admin­is­tered by The North Amer­i­can Catal­y­sis Soci­ety. The Award con­sists of a plaque and an hon­o­rar­i­um of $5,000. The plaque will be pre­sent­ed dur­ing the clos­ing ban­quet cer­e­monies at the 2013 North Amer­i­can Meet­ing of the Catal­y­sis Soci­ety. Pro­fes­sor Jones will also present a ple­nary lec­ture dur­ing this conference.

The Paul H. Emmett Award in Fun­da­men­tal Catal­y­sis is giv­en in recog­ni­tion of sub­stan­tial indi­vid­ual con­tri­bu­tions in the field of catal­y­sis with empha­sis on dis­cov­ery and under­stand­ing of cat­alyt­ic phe­nom­e­na, pro­pos­al of cat­alyt­ic reac­tion mech­a­nisms and iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of and descrip­tion of cat­alyt­ic sites and species.

The award rec­og­nizes the con­tri­bu­tions of Pro­fes­sor Christo­pher W. Jones to fun­da­men­tal advances in catal­y­sis at the inter­face between het­ero­ge­neous and homo­ge­neous catal­y­sis. Specif­i­cal­ly, his stud­ies of sil­i­ca and poly­mer-sup­port­ed Pd(II) pin­cer com­plex­es unrav­eled their behav­ior in Heck and Suzu­ki cou­pling reac­tions, where the com­plex­es were demon­strat­ed to form sol­u­ble lig­and-free species that cat­alyzed tra­di­tion­al Pd(0)-Pd(II) path­ways. His group has also devel­oped a fam­i­ly of sup­port­ed met­al-salen com­plex cat­a­lysts for enan­tios­e­lec­tive reac­tions, includ­ing coop­er­a­tive epox­ide ring-open­ing reac­tions and olefin cyclo­propa­na­tion. This work has focused on the sta­bil­i­ty and deac­ti­va­tion of these cat­a­lysts and clar­i­fied degra­da­tion path­ways, allow­ing the imple­men­ta­tion of sta­bi­liza­tion strate­gies to enhance cat­a­lyst turnovers.