The 2013 Tan­abe Prize for Acid-Base Catal­y­sis will be award­ed to Johannes A. Lercher, who receives the prize in recog­ni­tion of his sub­stan­tial con­tri­bu­tions to the field of acid-base catal­y­sis.

The award cer­e­mo­ny will take place at the 7th Inter­na­tion­al Sym­po­sium on Acid-Base Catal­y­sis in Tokyo, Japan May 12–15, 2013.

Johannes A. Lercher stud­ied Chem­istry and received his PhD at TU Wien. After a vis­it­ing lec­ture­ship at Yale, he joined TU Wien as lec­tur­er and lat­er Assoc. Pro­fes­sor. 1993 he was appoint­ed Pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty Twente, Depart­ment of Chem­i­cal Tech­nol­o­gy, and moved in 1998 to his cur­rent posi­tion as Pro­fes­sor of Chem­i­cal Tech­nol­o­gy at TU Munchen. Since 2011 he is also Direc­tor of the Insti­tute for Inte­grat­ed Catal­y­sis at the Pacif­ic North­west Nation­al Laboratory.

He is exter­nal mem­ber of the Aus­tri­an Acad­e­my of Sci­ences and Mem­ber of the Acad­e­mia Europaea, and holds sev­er­al Hon­orary Pro­fes­sor­ships. He serves cur­rent­ly as Edi­tor-in-Chief of the Jour­nal of Catalysis.

Research is focussed on fun­da­men­tal aspects of oxide and mol­e­c­u­lar sieve based sorp­tion and catal­y­sis, new routes to acti­vate and func­tion­al­ize hydro­car­bons, decon­struc­tion and defunc­tion­al­iza­tion of bio­mass, the mech­a­nis­tic under­stand­ing of hydrotreat­ing cat­a­lysts, and the in situ char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of cat­alyt­ic processes.
 
Source: www.shokubai.org/abc/tanabe.html