The Catal­y­sis Club of Philadel­phia is pleased to announce Dr. Daniel Resas­co as the recip­i­ent of the 2013 Catal­y­sis Club of Philadel­phia Award, in recog­ni­tion of his many con­tri­bu­tions relat­ed to sup­port­ed met­al and sol­id acid catal­y­sis, hydro­car­bon con­ver­sion, nan­otube syn­the­sis, and bio­mass-derived com­pound upgrading.

Prof. Resas­co obtained his PhD in chem­i­cal engi­neer­ing from Yale Uni­ver­si­ty in 1983 under the direc­tion of Gary Haller. While at Yale, he co-authored a sem­i­nal work explain­ing strong met­al-sup­port inter­ac­tions on Rh/TiO₂ cat­a­lysts that sub­se­quent­ly became a Cur­rent Con­tents Cita­tion Clas­sic. After grad­u­a­tion from Yale, he joined the chem­i­cal engi­neer­ing depart­ment of the Nation­al Uni­ver­si­ty of Mar del Pla­ta, Argenti­na, even­tu­al­ly serv­ing as depart­ment chair. In 1991 he returned to the US as Senior Sci­en­tist at the Sun Com­pa­ny, and in 1993 he joined the School of Chem­i­cal, Bio­log­i­cal and Mate­ri­als Engi­neer­ing at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Okla­homa where he is now the George Lynn Cross Research Pro­fes­sor and Dou­glas & Hil­da Bourne Chair of Chem­i­cal Engineering.

Prof. Resasco’s research in het­ero­ge­neous catal­y­sis has always aimed at impor­tant appli­ca­tions, but has been strong­ly ground­ed in fun­da­men­tals of struc­ture-prop­er­ty rela­tion­ships and char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of cat­a­lysts and mech­a­nisms. Ini­tial­ly, his research pro­gram exam­ined strong sol­id acid catal­y­sis and sup­port­ed met­al catal­y­sis for hydro­car­bon pro­cess­ing. In the late 90s, Resasco’s group began inves­ti­ga­tion of het­ero­ge­neous cat­alyt­ic syn­the­sis of sin­gle-wall car­bon nan­otubes, dis­cov­er­ing that care­ful con­trol of the cat­a­lyst nanos­truc­ture enabled unprece­dent­ed chi­ral selec­tiv­i­ty in the nanotubes.

Their work led to the patent­ed CoMo­Cat process, capa­ble of scale­up to indus­tri­al pro­duc­tion, and a spin­off com­pa­ny, South­West Nan­oTech­nolo­gies. More recent­ly, Resasco’s work on upgrad­ing of bio­mass-derived com­pounds led to the devel­op­ment of Janus nanopar­ti­cle cat­a­lysts which simul­ta­ne­ous­ly sta­bi­lize high inter­fa­cial area emul­sions and car­ry out upgrad­ing reac­tions in both the aque­ous and organ­ic phas­es. This work was ini­tial­ly report­ed in Sci­ence in Jan­u­ary, 2010.

Prof. Resas­co has authored well over 200 archival jour­nal arti­cles which have been cit­ed over 8,000 times, 32 indus­tri­al patents, and over 120 invit­ed lec­tures. From 2001 – 2007 Resas­co also served as asso­ciate edi­tor of the Jour­nal of Catalysis.

Prof. Resas­co will be hon­ored with a plaque an hon­o­rar­i­um ($1000) dur­ing his award pre­sen­ta­tion at the Catal­y­sis Club of Philadelphia’s month­ly meet­ings in the upcom­ing 2013–2014 season.