I am pleased to announce that Dr. Teh Ho of Exxon­Mo­bil (Retired) is the recip­i­ent of the 2018 F. G. Cia­pet­ta Lec­ture­ship in Catal­y­sis spon­sored by W. R. Grace & Co. It is award­ed bien­ni­al­ly in even-num­bered years. The award con­sists of a plaque and an hon­o­rar­i­um of $5,000. The plaque will be pre­sent­ed dur­ing the clos­ing ban­quet cer­e­monies at the 2019 North Amer­i­can Meet­ing of the Catal­y­sis Society.

Dr. Ho will be invit­ed to present lec­tures at the local catal­y­sis clubs and soci­eties dur­ing the two-year peri­od cov­ered by this award.

The F. G. Cia­pet­ta Lec­ture­ship in Catal­y­sis is giv­en in recog­ni­tion of sub­stan­tial con­tri­bu­tions to one or more areas in the field of catal­y­sis with empha­sis on indus­tri­al­ly sig­nif­i­cant cat­a­lysts and cat­alyt­ic process­es and the dis­cov­ery of new cat­alyt­ic reac­tions and sys­tems of poten­tial indus­tri­al importance.

Teh Ho has recent­ly retired from ExxonMobil’s cor­po­rate research lab­o­ra­to­ry after a 37-year indus­tri­al career (includ­ing 4 years with Hal­con R&D Devel­op­ment Corp). He con­tin­ues to spend his spare time writ­ing papers on catal­y­sis and reac­tion engi­neer­ing. He has been a pro­lif­ic author, writ­ing com­pre­hen­sive reviews on hydro­den­i­tro­gena­tion, hydrodesul­fu­r­iza­tion, and process modeling.

Teh had spent a large frac­tion of his career in prob­ing reac­tion kinet­ics of sev­er­al indus­tri­al­ly impor­tant areas with par­tic­u­lar empha­sis on sul­fide catal­y­sis and the role of hydro­gena­tion vs hydrogenol­y­sis and the influ­ence of basic vs. non-basic organo-nitro­gen species as inhibitors. To over­come the dif­fi­cul­ties of char­ac­ter­iz­ing high­ly dis­or­dered sul­fide cat­a­lysts, he devel­oped a dynam­ic tech­nique to deter­mine the num­ber of cat­alyt­ic active sites and the struc­ture-activ­i­ty rela­tion­ship for hydrodesul­fu­r­iza­tion cat­a­lysts. His work has always used high-lev­el mod­el­ing for gain­ing pre­dic­tive understanding.

He is the recip­i­ent of 2002 Thomas Alva Edi­son Patent Award of the Research Coun­cil of New Jer­sey, the 2002 Catal­y­sis and Reac­tion Engi­neer­ing Prac­tice Award of the AIChE, the 2004 AIChE Wil­helm Award, the 2006 AIChE Evans Chem­i­cal Engi­neer­ing Prac­tice Award. He capped off his indus­tri­al career with induc­tion into the Nation­al Acad­e­my of Engi­neer­ing in 2016.

Cita­tion: “Cat­alyt­ic removal of sul­fur and nitro­gen from hydro­car­bons for man­u­fac­tur­ing clean fuels and petrochemicals.”
 
Christo­pher W. Jones
Vice Pres­i­dent, North Amer­i­can Catal­y­sis Society