Bhan wins Emmett Award in Fundamental Catalysis

This award recognizes and encourages individual contributions in the field of catalysis with emphasis on discovery and understanding of catalytic phenomena, proposal of catalytic reaction mechanisms and identification of and description of catalytic sites and species. The award winner must not have turned 46 on April 1st of the award year. The award is sponsored by WR Grace & Co and managed by the North American Catalysis Society.
 
Professor Bhan and his group are recognized for bringing analytical formalisms and detailed experimentation to elicit kinetic and mechanistic information, verified against thermodynamic measurements and strictures, into hydrocarbon reaction systems of significant complexity and practical utility. His group has provided critical insight into how and why catalytic processes occur, both as they form desired products and as they lead to unselective or deactivating side paths for a number of important industrial catalytic processes including methanol-to-hydrocarbons catalysis, non-oxidative and oxidative alkane conversion, partial oxidation of olefins, hydrodeoxygenation, and dehydration. These studies have brought concepts of chemical kinetics and thermodynamics to derive fundamental insights into catalysis on zeolites, carbides, oxides, metals, and MOFs. His group has brought new concepts and definitions to the kinetic analysis of heterogeneous catalytic systems in developing a kinetic description of site ensembles on catalytic surfaces, in demonstrating rate functions of an overall reaction with many elementary steps can be written in a form analogous to the microscopic law of mass action, and in developing mathematical models describing rates and reversibility in complex reaction networks.

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