Professor Hans-Joachim Freund, Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society, Berlin, Germany, has been awarded the Michel Boudart Award for the Advance­ment of Catal­y­sis, spon­sored by Hal­dor Top­søe, Kongens Lyngby, Denmark, and admin­is­tered by the North Amer­i­can Catal­y­sis Soci­ety (NACS) and the Euro­pean Fed­er­a­tion of Catal­y­sis Soci­eties (EFCATS). The prize recognizes indi­vid­ual con­tri­bu­tions to the elu­ci­da­tion of the mech­a­nisms and active sites involved in cat­alytic phe­nom­ena and to the devel­op­ment of new meth­ods or con­cepts that advance the under­stand­ing and the prac­tice of het­ero­ge­neous catal­y­sis.

Freund is honored for his exper­i­men­tal advances in under­stand­ing ele­men­tary steps of reac­tions on cat­alytic sur­faces and for his stud­ies bridg­ing rel­e­vant catal­y­sis and sur­face reac­tions at sin­gle crys­tal sur­faces through the use of novel model cata­lysts with well-controlled struc­tural fea­tures. The award was presented at the 24th North American Meeting (NAM) of the Catalysis Society in Pitts­burgh, PA, USA and will be featured at Europacat XII in Kazan, Rus­sia, in August 2015.

Hans-Joachim Freund studied chemistry and physics at the University of Cologne, Germany. He received his Ph.D. there in 1978 for work under the supervision of Georg Hohlneicher and completed his habilitation in 1983. Freund was appointed Associate Professor at the University of Erlangen, Germany, in 1983, and Professor for Physical Chemistry at Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany, in 1987. Freund has been Director and Scientific Member of the Fritz Haber Institute, Berlin, Germany, since 1996. He has been involved in founding the Cluster of Excellence “Unifying Concepts in Catalysis” (UniCat), Berlin, Germany, and has also been a founding member of the Scientific Council of the European Research Council (ERC).

Among many other honors, Professor Freund has been awarded the Bunsen Medal by the Deutsche Bunsen-Gesellschaft für physikalische Chemie e.V. (DBG) in 2015, the Leibniz Award of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) in 1995, the Gabor A. Somorjai Award of the American Chemical Society (ACS) for Creative Research in Catalysis in 2007, and the Karl Ziegler Award of the Gesellschaft Deutscher Chemiker (GDCh, German Chemical Society) and the Karl Ziegler Foundation in 2011. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, a Fellow of the Institute of Physics, UK, a Member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, a member of the International Advisory Board of ChemCatChem, Editorial Board Member of ChemPhysChem, and a member of the GDCh/Wiley-VCH Verlagsbeirat (Publishing Advisory Board).

Professor Freund’s research interests include physics and chemistry of solid surfaces, structure and dynamics of oxide surfaces, model systems for heterogeneous catalysis, as well as nanostructures and clusters.

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Selected Publications by Hans-Joachim Freund

• Growth of Fe₃O₄(001) thin films on Pt(100): Tuning surface termination with an Fe buffer layer,
  Earl M. Davis, Ke Zhang, Yi Cui, Helmut Kuhlenbeck, Shamil Shaikhutdinov, Hans-Joachim Freund,
  Surf. Sci. 2015, 636, 42–46.
  DOI: 10.1016/j.susc.2015.02.004
• Formation of Water Chains on CaO(001): What Drives the 1D Growth?,
  Xunhua Zhao, Xiang Shao, Yuichi Fujimori, Saswata Bhattacharya, Luca M. Ghiringhelli, Hans-Joachim Freund, Martin Sterrer, Niklas Nilius, Sergey V. Levchenko,
  J. Phys. Chem. Lett. 2015, 6, 1204–1208.
  DOI: 10.1021/acs.jpclett.5b00223
• Lehrbuch der Physikalischen Chemie (in German),
  Gerd Wedler, Hans-Joachim Freund,
  Wiley-VCH, Weinheim, 2012.
  ISBN 978-3-527-32909-0
• Crossover from Three-Dimensional to Two-Dimensional Geometries of Au Nanostructures on Thin MgO(001) Films: A Confirmation of Theoretical Predictions,
  Martin Sterrer, Thomas Risse, Markus Heyde, Hans-Peter Rust, Hans-Joachim Freund,
  Phys. Rev. Lett. 2007.
  DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.98.206103
• Metal-supported ultrathin oxide film systems as designable catalysts and catalyst supports,
  Hans-Joachim Freund,
  Surf. Sci. 2007, 601, 1438–1442.
  DOI: 10.1016/j.susc.2007.01.025
• Nature of active sites in Ni2P hydrotreating catalysts as probed by iron substitution,
  Haiyan Zhao, S. Ted Oyama, Hans-Joachim Freund, Radosław Włodarczyk, Marek Sierka,
  Appl. Catal. B 2015, 164, 204–216.
  DOI: 10.1016/j.apcatb.2014.09.010
• Photochemistry on Metal Nanoparticles,
  Kazuo Watanabe, Dietrich Menzel, Niklas Nilius, Hans-Joachim Freund,
  Chem. Rev. 2006, 106, 4301–4320.
  DOI: 10.1021/cr050167g

 

Also of Interest

• Bunsen Medal 2015,
  ChemViews Magazine 2015.
  Hans-Joachim Freund, Director of the Fritz Haber Institute, Berlin, Germany, honored by the Deutsche Bunsen-Gesellschaft für physikalische Chemie e.V. (DBG, German Bunsen Society for Physical Chemistry)
• H.-J. Freund Receives Karl-Ziegler-Award,
  ChemViews Magazine 2011.
  Hans-Joachim Freund, director of the Fritz-Haber-Institut der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Germany, has been awarded the Karl Ziegler Prize