Three recip­i­ents were select­ed to receive awards for excel­lence in organ­ic catal­y­sis at the 21st Con­fer­ence of the Organ­ic Reac­tions Catal­y­sis Society(www.orcs.org) spon­sored by the Organ­ic Reac­tions Catal­y­sis Society(ORCS) on the week of April 2, 2006 in Orlan­do, Flori­da. The 2005 Paul N. Rylan­der Award went to Dr. Jean-Marie Bas­set, Lab­o­ra­toire de Chimie Organomet­allique de Sur­face, CNRS, Lyon, France and the 2006 Paul N. Rylan­der Award was pre­sent­ed to Pro­fes­sor Gadi Rothen­berg, Uni­ver­si­ty of Ams­ter­dam, The Nether­lands. The 2006 Mur­ray Raney Award, spon­sored by the W. R. Grace Co., was pre­sent­ed to Pro­fes­sor Isamu Yamauchi, Osa­ka Uni­ver­si­ty, Japan.

The Paul N. Rylan­der Award is an annu­al award, spon­sored by ORCS, made to an indi­vid­ual who has made sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tions to the use of catal­y­sis in organ­ic reac­tions as exem­pli­fied by Paul N. Rylan­der. The Mur­ray Raney Award is made to an indi­vid­ual who has made sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tions to chem­istry and the chem­istry indus­try via cat­a­lyst tech­nol­o­gy based on that orig­i­nal­ly devel­oped by Mur­ray Raney.

Bassett’s research has been on the fore­front of the cor­re­la­tion of reac­tions which occur at the active sites of het­ero­g­e­nized sur­face organomet­al­l­lic cat­a­lysts and solu­tion phase reac­tions of organometal­lic cat­a­lysts. This has allowed him to design well defined sur­face cat­a­lysts that cat­alyze reac­tions that some­times won’t occur in the homo­ge­neous phase. His pre­sen­ta­tion was titled “New Cat­alyt­ic Reac­tions Dis­cov­ered via Sur­face Organometal­lic Chemistry”.

Rothenberg’s research has pro­vid­ed nov­el, lig­and-free cat­a­lysts for car­bon-car­bon cou­pling reac­tions, as well as unique cat­a­lysts for selec­tive oxida­tive dehy­dro­gena­tion. Recent­ly he has devel­oped high-through­put data analy­sis meth­ods and cat­a­lyst descrip­tor mod­els to bet­ter find the best homo­ge­neous cat­a­lyst for a par­tic­u­lar trans­for­ma­tion. His pre­sen­ta­tion was enti­tled “How to Find the Best Homo­ge­neous Catalyst”.

Yamauchi’s research inves­ti­gat­ed improved meth­ods for prepar­ing pre­cur­sors to skele­tal cat­a­lysts, nov­el bimetal­lic com­po­si­tions, and appli­ca­tion of improved cop­per cat­a­lysts to the hydra­tion of acry­loni­trile and hydro­gena­tion of car­bon diox­ide. His talk was enti­tled “Syn­the­sis and Fea­tures of New Raney Cat­a­lysts from Metastable Precursors”.

The pro­ceed­ings of the meet­ing includ­ing the award address­es will appear in a future vol­ume of the Chem­i­cal Indus­tries series.