Hajo Freund of the Fritz Haber Institute has been selected as the recipient of the 2015 Michel Boudart Award for the Advancement of Catalysis

HajoFreundWe are pleased to announce that Pro­fes­sor Hans Joachim Fre­und of the Fritz Haber Insti­tute is the recip­i­ent of the 2015 Michel Boudart for the Advance­ment of Catal­y­sis, spon­sored by the Hal­dor Top­søe Com­pa­ny and admin­is­tered joint­ly by the North Amer­i­can Catal­y­sis Soci­ety and the Euro­pean Fed­er­a­tion of Catal­y­sis Soci­eties. The Award will be pre­sent­ed at the 24th North Amer­i­can Meet­ing of the Catal­y­sis Soci­ety (Pitts­burgh, June 2015) and at Europacat XII (Kazan, Rus­sia, August 2015).

This Award rec­og­nizes and encour­ages indi­vid­ual con­tri­bu­tions to the elu­ci­da­tion of the mech­a­nism and active sites involved in cat­alyt­ic phe­nom­e­na and to the devel­op­ment of new meth­ods or con­cepts that advance the under­stand­ing and the prac­tice of het­ero­ge­neous catal­y­sis. It is meant to rec­og­nize indi­vid­u­als who bring togeth­er the rig­or and the inter­na­tion­al impact that exem­pli­fied the accom­plish­ments and the career of Pro­fes­sor Michel Boudart.

Pro­fes­sor Hajo Fre­und is being specif­i­cal­ly rec­og­nized for his ground­break­ing exper­i­men­tal advances in under­stand­ing ele­men­tary steps of reac­tions on cat­alyt­ic sur­faces and for his stud­ies bridg­ing rel­e­vant catal­y­sis and sur­face reac­tions at sin­gle crys­tal sur­faces through the use of nov­el mod­el cat­a­lysts with well-con­trolled struc­tur­al fea­tures. His research group has syn­the­sized a broad range of rel­e­vant mate­ri­als, such as oxides of Al, Si, Ce, Ca, and V, use­ful as active mate­ri­als or sup­ports, with geo­met­ric and elec­tron­ic struc­tures, includ­ing sur­face defects, probed at the atom­ic lev­el using tun­nel­ing and atom­ic force microscopy tech­niques. His work has estab­lished the state-of-the-art in new tech­niques and instru­men­ta­tion and in the use of rel­e­vant mod­el sys­tems to estab­lish mech­a­nis­tic path­ways and struc­tur­al and elec­tron­ic require­ments in het­ero­ge­neous catal­y­sis. One exam­ple involves the first imple­men­ta­tion of elec­tron spin res­o­nance to sin­gle crys­tals, which has enabled the mon­i­tor­ing of the for­ma­tion and reac­tions of rad­i­cal species derived from adsor­bates and met­al nanopar­ti­cles on well-defined sur­faces. His stud­ies of sup­port­ed met­al nanopar­ti­cles (Pd, Au) have led to unprece­dent­ed insights into how sup­ports influ­ence the geo­met­ric and elec­tron­ic prop­er­ties and how dopants influ­ence the bind­ing prop­er­ties of such nanopar­ti­cles, even when dopants reside below sup­port sur­faces, through dopant-induced polarons that strong­ly influ­ence oxy­gen acti­va­tion. Recent­ly, his group suc­cess­ful­ly pre­pared hexag­o­nal SiO2 dou­ble lay­ers, which allowed the first direct obser­va­tion of the atom­ic struc­ture of amor­phous sil­i­ca using tun­nel­ing and atom­ic force microscopy and the syn­the­sis of a two-dimen­sion­al zeo­lite with bridg­ing hydrox­yl struc­tures, such as those present in chabazite frameworks.
 
Enrique Igle­sia
Pres­i­dent, North Amer­i­can Catal­y­sis Society
 
Johannes Lercher
Pres­i­dent, Euro­pean Fed­er­a­tion of Catal­y­sis Societies