The 2025 Herman Pines Award Recipient is Prof. Matthew Neurock

Herman Pines was an outstanding research scientist in both industry and academia, and his work revolutionized the general understanding of organic chemistry, particularly the chemistry of hydrocarbons interacting with strong acids. The Award in his honor is co-sponsored by UOP, where Herman Pines began his industrial career in 1930 and amassed 145 US patents, and by the Catalysis Club of Chicago, of which Herman Pines was a founding member while at Northwestern University.

Prof. Neurock is the Shell Distinguished Chaired Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science and Professor in Chemistry at the University of Minnesota, since 2014. Throughout his career, Matt has made pioneering advances that elucidate mechanistic concepts that connect disparate catalysis subdomains, making connections between homogeneous/heterogeneous, gas-phase/liquid-phase, and electrochemical/thermal catalysis by viewing catalytic reactivity through a molecular lens. Matt has been at the forefront of applications and developments of ab initio quantum mechanical methods within the US chemical engineering and catalysis communities. This leadership combined with his creativity and foresight into bringing computational chemistry to catalytic systems of significant complexity—in reaction environments with solvents, with background electrochemical potential, and with high surface coverages— has brought theoretical methods into the mainstream of catalysis research with tremendous impact on the interpretation of experiments and in the design of catalytic systems.