Professor Christophe Copéret, ETH Zurich, Switzerland, has been awarded the Paul H. Emmett Award in Fundamental Catalysis by the North Amer­i­can Catal­y­sis Soci­ety (NACS). The prize recognizes sub­stan­tial 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.

Copéret is honored for his contributions to the prepa­ra­tion of well-defined het­ero­ge­neous cat­a­lysts through a mol­e­c­u­lar approach based on the con­trolled func­tion­al­iza­tion of sur­faces and for the atomic descrip­tion of the sur­face species and active sites, in par­tic­u­lar via solid-state NMR spec­troscopy. The award was presented at the clos­ing ban­quet cer­e­monies at the 24th North American Meeting (NAM) of the Catalysis Society on June 18, 2015, in Pitts­burgh, PA, USA.

Christophe Copéret studied chemistry and chemical engineering at the École supérieure de chimie physique électronique de Lyon (CPE Lyon), France, and then recieved his Ph.D. in chemistry from Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA, under the supervision of E. Negishi in 1996. After a postdoctoral stay at the Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, CA, USA, in the group of K. B. Sharpless, Copéret was offered a permanent research position at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), France, in 1998, and was promoted to CNRS Research Director in 2008. Since 2010, he is Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Applied Biosciences at ETH Zurich, Switzerland.

Among other honors, Professor Copéret has received the CNRS Young Investigator Award in 2001, the Lemieux Lectureship from the University of Ottawa, Canada, in 2013, and the Meloche Lectureship from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA, in 2015. He is Editor of the Journal of Catalysis and belongs to the advisory boards of several journals (Advanced Synthesis & Catalysis, Catalysis Letters, Catalysis Science and Technology, ChemCatChem, and Topics in Catalysis). Copéret is also a board member of the Schweizerische Chemische Gesellschaft (SCS, Swiss Chemical Society), and President of the “Platform Chemistry” of the Swiss Academy of Natural Sciences (SCNat).

Professor Copéret’s reseach interests include the design of functional materials with applications in catalysis, molecular recognition, imaging and microelectronics.

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Selected Publications by Christophe Copéret

• Carbon–Carbon Bond Formation by Activation of CH₃F on Alumina,
  Aleix Comas-Vives, Martin Schwarzwälder, Christophe Copéret, Philippe Sautet,
  J. Phys. Chem. C 2015, 119, 7156–7163.
  DOI: 10.1021/jp512598p
• Increased methanation activity through passivation of the silica support,
  Karol Furman, David Baudouin, Tigran Margossian, Kaiwalya D. Sabnis, Yanran Cui, Fabio H. Ribeiro, Christophe Copéret,
  J. Catal. 2015, 324, 9–13.
  DOI: 10.1016/j.jcat.2015.01.006
• One-Photon Near-Infrared Sensitization of Well-Defined Yb(III) Surface Complexes for NIR-to-NIR Single Nanoparticle Imaging,
  Giuseppe Lapadula, David Trummer, Matthew P. Conley, Martin Steinmann, Ying-Fen Ran, Sophie Brasselet, Yannick Guyot, Olivier Maury, Silvio Decurtins, Shi-Xia Liu, Christophe Copéret,
  Chem. Mater. 2015, 27, 2033–2039.
  DOI: 10.1021/acs.chemmater.5b00306
• Homogeneous and Heterogeneous Catalysis: Bridging the Gap through Surface Organometallic Chemistry,
  Christophe Copéret, Mathieu Chabanas, Romain Petroff Saint-Arroman, Jean-Marie Basset,
  Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2003, 42, 156–181.
  DOI: 10.1002/anie.200390072
• A simple and efficient method for epoxidation of terminal alkenes,
  Christophe Copéret, Hans Adolfsson, K. Barry Sharpless,
  Chem. Commun. 1997.
  DOI: 10.1039/a703542j
• Cyclic Carbopalladation. A Versatile Synthetic Methodology for the Construction of Cyclic Organic Compounds,
  Ei-ichi Negishi, Christophe Copéret, Shengming Ma, Show-Yee Liou, Fang Liu,
  Chem. Rev. 1996, 96, 365–394.
  DOI: 10.1021/cr950020x