In Memoriam: Michel Boudart (1924–2012)

Michel Boudart, chem­i­cal engi­neer and expert in catal­y­sis, dies at 87 Pro­fes­sor Boudart taught at Prince­ton and Berke­ley but was best known for his five decades at the heart of the Depart­ment of Chem­i­cal Engi­neer­ing at Stan­ford. His influ­ence shaped catal­y­sis dur­ing the post-­-war peri­od when ener­gy, defense and space indus­tries demand­ed a deep­er under­stand­ing of chem­i­cal reactions.
 
By Andrew Myers
 
Michel Boudart, a pro­fes­sor emer­i­tus of chem­i­cal engi­neer­ing at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty and for five decades one of the world’s lead­ing experts in catal­y­sis, died May 2 at an assist­ed liv­ing cen­ter in Palo Alto, Cal­i­for­nia, of mul­ti­ple organ fail­ure. He was 87.

Boudart was the first William M. Keck, Sr. Pro­fes­sor of Chem­i­cal Engi­neer­ing and one of a very few indi­vid­u­als who were respon­si­ble for estab­lish­ing the rep­u­ta­tion of Stanford’s chem­i­cal engi­neer­ing depart­ment. The cen­tral theme of his research was the cat­alyt­ic prop­er­ties of met­als, par­tic­u­lar­ly small met­al particles.

Boudart essen­tial­ly brought catal­y­sis, as a sci­ence, to chem­i­cal engi­neer­ing in the Unit­ed States. He was an inter­na­tion­al ambas­sador for the field over his entire career.

Michel Boudart was a world renowned and influ­en­tial expert in the field of catal­y­sis who brought the Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty chem­i­cal engi­neer­ing to promi­nence and trained sev­er­al decades of stu­dents,” said Andreas Acrivos, a fel­low pro­fes­sor at Stan­ford and now pro­fes­sor emer­i­tus both at Stan­ford and at the City Col­lege of CUNY. “He left a lega­cy that would be dif­fi­cult to replicate.”

As a pro­fes­sor, Boudart super­vised what was con­sis­tent­ly one of the larg­er groups of PhD can­di­dates in the depart­ment, even­tu­al­ly guid­ing over 70 doc­tor­al can­di­dates to their degrees and men­tor­ing over 100 post-­-doc­tor­al can­di­dates and vis­it­ing sci­en­tists. The dias­po­ra of his for­mer stu­dents would go on to lead and shape the field.

Le plus de saveur

 
An avid inter­na­tion­al trav­eller, Boudart and his wife, Mari­na, boast­ed friends across the world. His office sport­ed Japan­ese sho­ji screens, abstract prints, and over­stuffed sofas and – occu­py­ing one entire wall – an immense peri­od­ic table of the ele­ments, print­ed in Russ­ian, which he read with ease.

In a brief biog­ra­phy, Boudart cit­ed as his per­son­al phi­los­o­phy a quote from French lit­er­ary the­o­rist Roland Barthes: “Nul pou­voir, un peu de savoir, un peu de sagesse, et le plus de saveur pos­si­ble.” Trans­lat­ed loose­ly, it reads: “No pow­er, a lit­tle knowl­edge, a lit­tle wis­dom, and as much fla­vor as pos­si­ble.” In this con­text, he will always be remem­bered as a man of real per­son­al charis­ma and, one of the last “gen­tle­man scientists.”

Catal­y­sis is the study of chem­i­cal process­es by which one sub­stance, the cat­a­lyst, pro­motes a reac­tion between oth­er sub­stances with­out itself changing.
It is fun­da­men­tal to the chem­i­cal, petro­le­um and phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal indus­tries, among many others.

In the post-­-war era, the Unit­ed States became the acknowl­edged leader in the field, most­ly owing to advances flow­ing out of Amer­i­can acad­e­mia and indus­try. Boudart was at the cen­ter of it all. He was an unabashed cham­pi­on of catal­y­sis. Though the field is obscure to most lay audi­ences, catal­y­sis has a pro­found impact on our world and how we live.

In a pub­lished inter­view, Boudart once laid out his case: With­out catal­y­sis, he said, “[o]ur satel­lites could not be maneu­vered, our autos would pour out all the nox­ious chem­i­cals we’ve spent years guard­ing against. Our tele­phone links with the rest of the world would be seri­ous­ly impeded.”

In 1975, in the wake of the first oil cri­sis, Boudart and two asso­ciates found­ed Cat­alyt­i­ca in San­ta Clara, Cal­i­for­nia, which worked on high­ly com­plex cat­alyt­ic prob­lems for petro­chem­i­cal, chem­i­cal, and phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal firms as well as gov­ern­ment agen­cies. He served as a con­sul­tant to numer­ous well-­-known companies.

[Cat­alyt­i­ca] start­ed in the catal­y­sis con­sult­ing field, a ser­vice made clear­ly nec­es­sary by the oil cri­sis,” Boudart said at the time. “One of the crit­i­cal areas was in syn­thet­ic fuels.”

Guid­ing force
Acco­lades and awards were show­ered on Boudart through­out his life, but par­tic­u­lar­ly in the lat­er years of his career, when the scale of his impact became clear.

In 1985, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Utah host­ed a five-­-day sym­po­sium on catal­y­sis sole­ly in Boudart’s hon­or. In 2004, the Jour­nal of Phys­i­cal Chem­istry ded­i­cat­ed an entire issue to Boudart’s legacy.

In their intro­duc­tion, the journal’s edi­tors wrote, “Michel Boudart has been the guid­ing force in the field of het­ero­ge­neous catal­y­sis for more than forty years. He was known for ele­gant­ly stat­ed con­cepts and his elu­ci­da­tion of cat­alyt­ic sites, his exper­i­men­tal stud­ies of new cat­alyt­ic mate­ri­als, and the activ­i­ties of [his] many stu­dents and collaborators …”

The jour­nal cit­ed his fore­most achieve­ment as the quan­tifi­ca­tion of catal­y­sis as rig­or­ous sequences of ele­men­tary steps. He focused atten­tion on the need to report reac­tion rates eval­u­at­ed under the most rig­or­ous assess­ment tech­niques avail­able and he intro­duced the con­cept of turnover rate – the num­ber of mol­e­cules con­vert­ed per site per sec­ond. He then per­fect­ed pre­cise pro­to­cols for accu­rate mea­sure­ment of reactions.

Boudart’s insis­tence on rig­or­ous col­lec­tion and report­ing of data proved invalu­able in com­par­ing data gen­er­at­ed by dif­fer­ent lab­o­ra­to­ries through­out the world and enabled many sub­se­quent advances in the field. His vision, lead­er­ship, and wis­dom were cred­it­ed as a major force in bring­ing catal­y­sis to a point where the design of spe­cif­ic cat­alyt­ic mate­ri­als for envi­ron­men­tal pro­tec­tion, pro­duc­tion of chem­i­cals, and ener­gy con­ver­sion process­es became possible.

In 2006, the Dan­ish com­pa­ny Hal­dor Top­søe spon­sored The Michel Boudart Award for the Advance­ment of Catal­y­sis, which is admin­is­tered joint­ly by the North Amer­i­can Catal­y­sis Soci­ety and the Euro­pean Fed­er­a­tion of Catal­y­sis Societies.

Profound legacy

 
Michel Boudart was born on 18 June 1924 in Brus­sels, Bel­gium. In 1940, as Hitler’s Panz­er divi­sions blitzkrieged his home­land, Boudart was just 16. He had been accept­ed to the Uni­ver­si­ty of Lou­vain, but the uni­ver­si­ty was closed due to the war.

In order not to be draft­ed or sent to Ger­man fac­to­ries, Boudart worked as a vol­un­teer stretch­er-­-bear­er for the Red Cross. Mean­while, he had pri­vate tutor­ing to pre­pare for Lou­vain. When the uni­ver­si­ty reopened, Boudart grad­u­at­ed in three years at the top of every class, save math­e­mat­ics, where he was out­done only by his dear friend, the late Pro­fes­sor Rene de Voge­laere of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Berkeley.

Boudart earned his B.S. at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Lou­vain in 1944 and his M.S. in 1947. He then left Bel­gium to attend Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty, where he took his PhD in chem­istry in 1950. “He and his wife Mari­na were born in Bel­gium and were knight­ed by the crown, but Amer­i­ca was their adopt­ed home,” said Acrivos. “Their chil­dren are thor­ough­ly American.”

After earn­ing his doc­tor­ate, Boudart held fac­ul­ty posi­tions at Prince­ton until 1961 and, for three years, at Berke­ley, before join­ing the Stan­ford fac­ul­ty in 1964. He was Chair of the Depart­ment of Chem­i­cal Engi­neer­ing at Stan­ford from 1975 to 1978. He also held vis­it­ing pro­fes­sor­ships at the Uni­ver­si­ties of Lou­vain, Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo, and Paris. He became pro­fes­sor emer­i­tus in 1994.

Boudart authored or coau­thored over 280 jour­nal arti­cles and served on the edi­to­r­i­al boards of at least ten jour­nals. His book, Kinet­ics of Chem­i­cal Process­es, is a stan­dard ref­er­ence and was trans­lat­ed into Japan­ese, Span­ish, and French. His book, Kinet­ics of Het­ero­ge­neous Cat­alyt­ic Process­es, writ­ten with G. Dje­ga-­-Mari­adas­sou, was pub­lished in French in 1982 and trans­lat­ed to Eng­lish in 1984. He was coed­i­tor-­- in-­-chief of Catal­y­sis Sci­ence and Engi­neer­ing, a series of twelve volumes.

Boudart was recip­i­ent of numer­ous awards, among them the Wil­helm Award in Chem­i­cal Reac­tion Engi­neer­ing from the Amer­i­can Insti­tute of Chem­i­cal Engi­neers (1974), the Kendall Award (1977) and the Mur­phee Award (1985) from the Amer­i­can Chem­i­cal Soci­ety, and the Chem­i­cal Pio­neer Award (1991) of the Amer­i­can Insti­tute of Chemists.

His elec­tion to both the Nation­al Acad­e­my of Sci­ence and the Nation­al Acad­e­my of Engi­neer­ing were reflec­tions of Boudart’s lead­er­ship and his sci­en­tif­ic grav­i­tas. He was like­wise a Fel­low of the Amer­i­can Asso­ci­a­tion for the Advance­ment of Sci­ence, the Amer­i­can Acad­e­my of Arts and Sci­ences, and the Cal­i­for­nia Acad­e­my of Sci­ences. He was a for­eign mem­ber of the Acad­e­mia Royale des Sci­ences, des Let­tres et des Beaux-­-Arts de Bel­gique and its Roy­al Bel­gian Acad­e­my Coun­cil for Applied Sciences.

Boudart received hon­orary doc­tor­ates from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Liege, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Notre Dame, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ghent, and the Insti­tut Nation­al Poly­tech­nique de Lorraine.

He held four patents

 
Boudart is sur­vived by a daugh­ter, Iris Har­ris, of Whit­ti­er, Calif.; three sons, Marc, of Aptos, Calif.; Bau­douin, of Ather­ton, Calif; and Philip, of Palo Alto; and grand­chil­dren Mari­na and Clint Har­ris; and Jesse, Louise, and Noel­la Boudart. His wife, Mari­na d’Haese Boudart, died in 2009. A sec­ond daugh­ter, Dominique, died in childhood.
 
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