Dr. Jef­fery Brick­er, Senior Direc­tor of Research at Hon­ey­well UOP is the recip­i­ent of the 2017 Eugene J. Houdry Award of the North Amer­i­can Catal­y­sis Soci­ety. The Eugene J. Houdry Award in Applied Catal­y­sis is spon­sored by Clari­ant. It is admin­is­tered by The Catal­y­sis Soci­ety and award­ed bien­ni­al­ly in odd-num­bered years. 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 a prize of $5,000, which will be pre­sent­ed at the 25th North Amer­i­can Meet­ing of the Catal­y­sis Soci­ety to be held in Den­ver, CO, June 4–9, 2017. The Award Ple­nary lec­ture will also be pre­sent­ed dur­ing this meeting.

Dr. Bricker’s achieve­ments include the dis­cov­ery of key reac­tion mech­a­nisms in thi­ol oxi­da­tion chem­istry in refin­ery fuels, lead­ing to the com­mer­cial­iza­tion of an oxi­da­tion cat­a­lyst that func­tions in the absence of caus­tic. He also invent­ed new light paraf­fin dehy­dro­gena­tion cat­a­lysts with supe­ri­or dif­fu­sion­al prop­er­ties, that is cur­rent­ly used in more than 60 per­cent of world­wide on-demand capac­i­ty. He invent­ed and devel­oped a very selec­tive and sta­ble cat­a­lyst for the oxi­da­tion of hydro­gen for inter-stage reheat­ing in eth­yl­ben­zene dehy­dro­gena­tion for com­mer­cial styrene pro­duc­tion. Final­ly, Dr. Brick­er and his team used dif­fu­sion con­trol to improve the dehy­dro­gena­tion tech­nol­o­gy for pro­duc­tion of lin­ear alkyl ben­zenes (LAB), which are the pre­cur­sors for biodegrad­able deter­gents. LAB is pro­duced by selec­tive dehy­dro­gena­tion of lin­ear C10 to C15 alka­nes into lin­ear mono-alkenes fol­lowed by alky­la­tion with ben­zene. This new cat­a­lyst tech­nol­o­gy reduces by-prod­uct heavy alky­late by 20 per­cent and is used to pro­duce more than 80 per­cent of the world’s LAB.

Brick­er received a Bach­e­lor of Sci­ence in Math­e­mat­ics and Chem­istry from Hei­del­berg Uni­ver­si­ty in 1979 and a Ph.D. in Chem­istry from The Ohio State Uni­ver­si­ty in 1983. Jeff’s inno­va­tions and 61 US patents have been rec­og­nized with sev­er­al awards includ­ing the 2011 ACS Nation­al Award for Cre­ative Inven­tion; the UOP Stine Star Award, giv­en for the best break­through of the year; Spe­cial­ty Mate­ri­als Growth and Inno­va­tion Award and the 2015 Hon­ey­well Dis­tin­guished Tech­nol­o­gist Award, giv­en for out­stand­ing tech­ni­cal con­tri­bu­tions over the course of a career. He fre­quent­ly lec­tures on catal­y­sis glob­al­ly and was the 2008 Devon W. Meek Lecturer.
 
Enrique Igle­sia
Pres­i­dent, North Amer­i­can Catal­y­sis Society