Pro­fes­sor Fabio Ribeiro of the Depart­ment of Chem­i­cal Engi­neer­ing at Pur­due Uni­ver­si­ty has been named the recip­i­ent of the 2012 Inter­na­tion­al Pre­cious Met­als Insti­tute Hen­ry J. Albert Award, spon­sored by BASF Cor­po­ra­tion, in recog­ni­tion of his out­stand­ing the­o­ret­i­cal and exper­i­men­tal con­tri­bu­tions to the sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy of pre­cious met­als. His research group com­bines mea­sure­ments on real­is­tic dis­persed clus­ters and flat mod­el sys­tems with pre­ci­sion and reli­a­bil­i­ty at the state-of-the-art. He has pro­vid­ed the kinet­ic data set for water-gas shift that rep­re­sents the stan­dard used by oth­ers in bench­mark­ing of oth­er mate­ri­als and of the­o­ret­i­cal esti­mates. This work has also demon­strat­ed the strong effects of sup­ports in the acti­va­tion of water in water-gas shift and that all exposed sur­face atoms are active on Pt clus­ters but only cor­ner atoms with low coor­di­na­tion are active on Au clus­ters. His sem­i­nal stud­ies of NOx reac­tions have unveiled the mech­a­nism of NO oxi­da­tion and pro­vid­ed ele­gant exam­ples of the use of spec­tro­scop­ic and kinet­ic tools in unrav­el­ing the com­plex path­ways in NOx trap­ping on Ba-pro­mot­ed Pt/alumina sys­tems. His group con­tin­ues to expand the exper­i­men­tal fron­tiers with recent devel­op­ments X‑ray absorp­tion spec­troscopy dur­ing catal­y­sis at high pres­sures in liq­uid and gaseous media, with infrared analy­sis of adsorbed species dur­ing iso­topic tran­sients, and with state-of-the-art envi­ron­men­tal trans­mis­sion elec­tron microscopy. These suc­cess­es build on his ear­li­er stud­ies of Pd cat­a­lysts which defined the reac­tion path­ways involved in cat­alyt­ic com­bus­tion of methane and in cat­alyt­ic hydrodechlo­ri­na­tion of a wide range of hydrochlo­ro­flu­o­ro­car­bon molecules.