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2nd Annual Merck Symposium
Merck Speaker: About the Lecture: Traditional methods of catalyst synthesis and testing are slow and inefficient. Whether one considers either homogeneous or heterogeneous catalyst systems, the root causes for this problem are the same: the ability to theoretically predict the structure, properties or synthesis of new catalytic systems is poor to non-existent, and the catalyst and catalyst formulations are prepared and tested one at a time in a manually intensive fashion. While theoretical modeling can help guide the chemist in designing and synthesizing targets, even in the most well understood areas of catalysis, the parameter space that one needs to explore experimentally is huge. The result is that the chemist using traditional methods must navigate a complex and unpredictable diversity space with a limited data set in order to make discoveries, a situation that is perhaps acceptable for the optimization of known systems where the synthesis-structure-property surface is relatively smooth, but unacceptably inefficient for the optimization of systems where this surface is jagged or for the discovery of unprecedented catalytic systems. The reliance on traditional methods of catalyst research leads to a bottleneck in the supply of fundamentally new classes of catalytic materials and enormous competition in industrial and academic laboratories during the optimization of the very few new systems that are discovered and published. Given the inefficiency of the traditional optimization of new catalytic systems, it is not surprising that these competitions last for decades, such as in the case of the metallocene olefin polymerization catalysts where intense competition within industry and academics began in the early 1980’s and continues today. Symyx Technologies has pioneered the development of high-throughput techniques and workflows for the discovery and optimization of catalytic materials including both homogeneous and heterogeneous systems. We assemble these workflows to create hierarchical research methodologies that greatly increase the efficiency of discovering and optimizing catalytic systems. This presentation will describe the use of advanced high-throughput research methods for discovery and optimization of commercially important olefin polymerization catalyst systems. While these systems hold promise for many applications within the polyolefins industry, their use in the polymerization of propylene to produce isotactic polypropylene in a solution process will be the focus of this lecture. About Weinberg: W. Henry Weinberg obtained a B.S. degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of South Carolina, and a Ph.D. degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1971. After a postdoctoral year at the University of Cambridge, he joined the faculty of the California Institute of Technology in 1972. He was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 1974, and to Professor of Chemical Engineering and Chemical Physics in 1977. He was the first Chevron Professor of Chemical Engineering from 1981 to 1986. He was a Visiting Professor of Chemistry at Harvard University in 1980, a Visiting Professor of Chemistry at the University of Munich in 1982, a Visiting Professor of Chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh in 1987-88, and a Visiting Professor of Materials at the University of Oxford in 1991. He assumed the position of Professor of Chemical Engineering, Materials Engineering, and Chemistry at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1989. He was appointed CTO of Symyx Technologies of Santa Clara, CA in 1996 and remains an Adjunct Professor at UCSB. Weinberg was a Principal Investigator in the US-USSR Exchange Program in Chemical Catalysis between 1974 and 1980. He has served on numerous review panels for industrial and academic organizations, and for various governmental agencies (particularly, the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation). Currently, he is on the Advisory Editorial Board of Physical Chemistry Communications and Journal of Combinatorial Chemistry; and he is the General Editor of the prestigious review journal Surface Science Reports. Weinberg has received numerous awards and honors, including the following: Wayne B. Nottingham Prize of the American Physical Society, Victor K. Lamer Award of the American Chemical Society, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship, Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation Teacher-Scholar Award, Creativity Award of the National Science Foundation, Allan P. Colburn Award of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Senior U. S. Scientist Award, Giuseppe Parravano Award of the Michigan Catalysis Society, Colloid or Surface Chemistry (Kendall) Award of the American Chemical Society, Arthur W. Adamson Award for the Advancement of Surface Chemistry of the American Chemical Society, and the Distinguished Teaching Award of the College of Engineering at UCSB. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Physical Society, and the American Vacuum Society, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering (USA). Weinberg is a named inventor on 18 U.S., Canadian, and European patents. He has presented over 400 invited lectures or seminars at various academic, industrial, and governmental organizations around the world during the past 25 years including the 1994 Distinguished Foreign Lectureship of the College of Engineering of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, the 1995 American Chemical Society Distinguished Lectureship of the Chemical Engineering Department of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, the 1996 Astor Distinguished Lectureship of the University of Oxford, the 1999 Herman S. Bloch Memorial Lecture of the University of Chicago, and the 2000 Founders’ Lectureship of the Chemical Engineering Department of the University of Wisconsin at Madison. During that same period of time, he has presented over 200 invited or contributed talks at various national and international conferences. He has authored or co-authored over 550 scientific papers that have appeared in refereed journals, as well as the book Low-Energy Electron Diffraction: Experiment, Theory, and Surface Structural Determination, Springer-Verlag, Heidelberg, 1986, 608 pp (with M.A. van Hove and C.-M. Chan). All of these publications are related to various aspects of surface chemistry and physics, heterogeneous catalysis, or combinatorial materials science. About the Merck Symposium:
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“High-Throughput Methodologies Applied to the Discovery and Optimization of Homogeneous Catalysts with Olefin Polymerization as an Exemplar.”