Dr. James C. Stevens, Cor­po­rate Fel­low of the The Dow Chem­i­cal Com­pa­ny, is the recip­i­ent of the 2011 Eugene J. Houdry Award in Applied Catal­y­sis of the North Amer­i­can Catal­y­sis Soci­ety, spon­sored by Süd-Chemie, Inc. and admin­is­tered by the Catal­y­sis Soci­ety. This award rec­og­nizes and encour­ages indi­vid­ual con­tri­bu­tions in the field of catal­y­sis with empha­sis on the devel­op­ment of new and improved cat­a­lysts and process­es rep­re­sent­ing out­stand­ing advances in their use­ful appli­ca­tion. The award con­sists of a plaque and an hon­o­rar­i­um, which will be pre­sent­ed at the 22nd North Amer­i­can Meet­ing of the Catal­y­sis Soci­ety to be held in Detroit, Michi­gan on June 5–10, 2011, dur­ing which Dr. Stevens will present his Award Ple­nary lecture. 

The 2011 Eugene J. Houdry Award rec­og­nizes Dr. Stevens for his out­stand­ing con­tri­bu­tions to the indus­tri­al­ly impor­tant field of poly­olefin catal­y­sis. Dr. Stevens led break­through research efforts that fos­tered some of most sig­nif­i­cant recent advances in poly­olefins tech­nol­o­gy. These inno­va­tions include the devel­op­ment and com­mer­cial imple­men­ta­tion of INSITE™ Tech­nol­o­gy and Constrained–Geometry Cat­a­lysts, which has led to the pro­duc­tion of more than 2 bil­lion pounds of poly­olefins per year.

Dr. Stevens’ track record in extend­ing the bound­aries of new catal­y­sis tech­nolo­gies and in using his exten­sive indus­tri­al and engi­neer­ing knowl­edge to trans­late ear­ly-stage dis­cov­er­ies into com­mer­cial suc­cess­es have been espe­cial­ly evi­dent in his lead­er­ship in the area of high through­put research meth­ods through col­lab­o­ra­tive research with oth­er insti­tu­tions. The trans­la­tion of con­cepts from such meth­ods to inves­ti­ga­tions of homo­ge­neous cat­a­lyst sys­tems pre­sent­ed sig­nif­i­cant chal­lenges, among them the need for screen­ing process­es to account for the strin­gent require­ments asso­ci­at­ed with the ulti­mate pro­duc­tion of these mate­ri­als at com­mer­cial scale. His research group has devel­oped nov­el “chain-shut­tling” process­es, in which poly­olefin chains are rapid­ly exchanged between two sin­gle-site cat­alyt­ic cen­ters to cre­ate, cat­alyt­i­cal­ly for the first time, olefin block copoly­mers with thou­sands of poly­mer chains pro­duced per cat­a­lyst mol­e­cule. These INFUSE™ Olefin Block Co-Poly­mers were recent­ly award­ed a R&D 100 Award for New Materials. 

The achieve­ments of Dr. Stevens have been pre­vi­ous­ly rec­og­nized with awards from the Amer­i­can Chem­i­cal Soci­ety and var­i­ous inter­na­tion­al sci­en­tif­ic orga­ni­za­tions. Dr. Stevens was a key con­trib­u­tor to the body of Dow research that received the high­est hon­or bestowed by the Unit­ed States gov­ern­ment for tech­no­log­i­cal achieve­ments, the Nation­al Medal of Technology.