Message from the IIC Interim Director
As you are aware by now, the IIC Director, Professor JM (Mike) White, died unexpectedly in late August. I have been asked by PNNL management to take on the role of Interim Director of the IIC until a permanent replacement for Mike can be found. It is a difficult challenge on both a professional and personal level to think about moving the IIC forward without Mike’s leadership. In fact, however, Mike’s typical yet unique endings to his messages, “press on”, provides both encouragement and inspiration, and they are words to challenge us to continue to push for the realization of Mike’s vision for the IIC, a vision I wholeheartedly share. As such, I plan to keep Mike’s last Director’s message, below, up on our website for another several months. It continues to highlight well where we believe the IIC is needed and where it hopes to make important research contributions over the next several years. For those interested, here is a link to the eulogy I delivered at Mike’s memorial service in Richland, WA, on September 21, 2007.
Chuck Peden
Interim Director, Institute for Interfacial Catalysis
Mike White
1938-2007
Mike White’s Last “Message from the Director”
The words, "Control of Chemical Transformations for a Secure Energy Future", the tag line of the Institute for Interfacial Catalysis, underscore our primary objective and serve as an excellent way of communicating our central purpose to the world at large.
How will catalysis contribute to a secure energy future for our country? World-wide energy needs are increasing rapidly and new technologies are sorely needed that will deliver secure and sustainable supplies of energy in an environmentally responsible fashion. Any review of the present energy landscape—production, storage, transmission and utilization—reveals the central role played by chemical transformations. Indeed, making and breaking chemical bonds dominates most future energy scenarios, and doing so with maximum efficiency and minimal waste across the landscape is necessarily involved in securing our energy future. At its heart, catalysis addresses these two themes; indeed, to quote a 2003 report, "The Grand Challenge for catalysis science in the 21st Century is to understand how to design catalyst structures to control catalytic activity and selectivity".
Activity and selectivity control are the central ingredients of maximizing efficiency and minimizing waste in chemical transformations. In the context of delivering a secure energy future, this is the grand challenge that motivates the fundamental, use-inspired and applied catalysis and chemical process research of the Institute for Interfacial Catalysis.
To reiterate, "How does catalysis enter the scene?" Indeed, as one centerpiece on which our secure energy future rests.