TAKING THE PULSE OF CATALYSIS FUNDING
Uncertain support for catalysis research spurs scientists and funding reps into action

MITCH JACOBY, C&EN CHICAGO

Raising funds for research is a matter of survival for most academic research group leaders. Early in their careers, professors learn that as funding agencies shine their spotlights on new scientific topics, older subjects slip into the shadows--and out of vogue.

	IN THE LAB Research in catalysis and surface science laboratories in the U.S. and Europe, like this one at Northwestern University, is supported by a variety of financial sources. PHOTO BY MITCH JACOBY

In the U.S., catalysis funding has been "stagnant for several years--even decreasing across the federal funding agencies," according to Raul Miranda, a catalysis program manager in the Department of Energy's Office of Basic Energy Sciences (BES). The situation hasn't gone unnoticed by American scientists. Enrique Iglesia, a professor of chemical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, acknowledges that there has been "a thinning out of catalysis research groups." But that is not necessarily unhealthy, Iglesia says, finding a silver lining: "The increased competition has led to stronger, higher quality, and more resourceful research groups working on fundamental problems of a more relevant nature."

Other researchers express a different view. At the University of Delaware, for example, chemical engineering professor Mark A. Barteau declares, "The field has been on starvation rations for a decade."

Whether it's starving or just thinning, the perceived famine isn't about to be replaced by a feast. But some help has just arrived. In September, BES announced the results of a new program to support catalysis research. Just over $20 million has been granted to groups at universities and national laboratories in the program's first three-year round. The new funds represent a 30% increase in BES catalysis support for 2003. "Although it's small in terms of dollars, we think the initiative will inject a long-needed booster shot into a science that's ripe for its next quantum leap," Miranda remarks.

THE FOCUS of the new program is basic catalysis science--as opposed to catalyst development. Miranda explains that the greatest challenge facing catalysis is building up enough understanding of the fundamentals to enable scientists to design highly efficient catalytic materials, a priori, and then synthesize them. Ideally, first-principles catalyst design would result in active and very selective catalysts that guide chemical reactants through bond making, breaking, and rearranging in a way that produces just the target product. That level of control is one of the keys to further improvements in waste reduction and energy efficiency on the part of the chemical industry.

DOE's latest effort marks what Miranda terms "a new mode" of funding catalysis research. Unlike the traditional style of funding, in which grantees are individual principal investigators, in the new program grant recipients are groups of investigators with complementary expertise. In total, 11 teams consisting of 59 principal investigators from 19 universities and three national laboratories have been awarded research funds.

"Over the past 20 years, there's been a move toward informal collaborations," Miranda observes. "Informal" means that researchers from various institutions elect to work together without official recognition of their group status by a funding agency. Such teams come in various sizes and shapes. For example, a research group specializing in surface science and spectroscopy might team up with researchers elsewhere with synthesis expertise, and a third group with simulation and computational skills. "It happens out of necessity because of the need for ever more specialized knowledge and tools," Miranda asserts.

Although the team approach to catalysis research is not very common at U.S. academic institutions, it is well established elsewhere. A group of scientists having widely varying backgrounds is the hallmark of catalysis research teams in the Netherlands and elsewhere in Europe (C&EN, June 3, 2002, page 42). The practice of forming such teams also is common in industry in many countries.

But team building requires more than just a desire to work together. In the U.K. and the Netherlands, for example, multidisciplinary teams are established readily because they're formalized through official funding policies by those countries' science ministries. In contrast, single-principal-investigator research groups have been the norm in American universities--in Miranda's view--because of "an academic reward and advancement mechanism that is incompatible with team research." The problem is compounded, he says, by a profound gap between the long-term goals of publicly funded catalysis research and the short-term objectives of industrial research.

"Our new funding initiative is an attempt to forge teams that are focused on common fundamental objectives," Miranda explains. For that reason, the DOE program aims to merge catalysis knowledge that has traditionally been compartmentalized as homogeneous, heterogeneous, and biocatalysis. The same is true of DOE's intent to blur the lines between surface science and nanoscience. "These new teams bring together all of the appropriate disciplines and length scales required to address the challenges they have identified," he tells C&EN.

One of the new groups brings together scientists from three universities to focus on the first-principles design approach to discovering highly selective bimetallic catalysts. The team will concentrate on catalysts for hydrogenation, selective epoxidation, and carbohydrate-reforming reactions. The group includes Barteau and five additional professors at Delaware's Center for Catalytic Science & Technology; Texas A&M University chemistry professor Richard M. Crooks; and chemical engineering professors James A. Dumesic and Manos Mavrikakis at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

"By putting together this group, we've assembled all of the pieces of the puzzle," Barteau remarks. The group includes specialists in computational surface chemistry, ultrahigh vacuum surface science, design and synthesis of dendrimers and other materials for solution-phase catalysis, and high-throughput screening. Barteau points out that the team also has expertise in reactor-scale modeling and optimization "to complete the package and develop a thorough understanding of the way the new catalytic systems will function." He adds that the plan calls for several Delaware and Wisconsin graduate students to be supervised jointly, "to effect the desired synergy."

One of the other teams is focusing on enantioselective surface chemistry--a topic in which interest has grown quickly (C&EN, March 25, 2002, page 43). That project includes Francisco Zaera, a chemistry professor at the University of California, Riverside; chemical engineering professors Andrew J. Gellman and David S. Sholl of Carnegie Mellon University; Wilfred T. Tysoe, a chemistry professor at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee; and an external collaborator at National University of San Luis, in Argentina.

The group's objective is to elucidate fundamental mechanisms responsible for chiral selectivity in heterogeneous catalytic reactions. The plan is to combine several experimental approaches with theoretical and computational techniques.

"The initiative forced us to think about what we could accomplish working together that we couldn't do alone," Zaera says. The answer they came up with is this: pooling the expertise that the team members had developed independently during the past few years working on distinct types of chiral systems. The systems include materials in which the arrangement of surface atoms makes them chiral intrinsically, supramolecular assemblies of small chiral molecules that feature chiral binding sites, and large complexes that serve as modifiers that impart chirality to otherwise achiral catalyst surfaces.

BY TAILORING their experiments collectively--for example, by decreasing the complexity of the large modifiers in one of the members' laboratories while increasing the complexity of the small chiral molecules in another lab--the team members aim to identify the features that are common to all chiral surface reaction mechanisms. Similarly, they're trying to discover the point at which the mechanism that guides one type of chiral system undergoes a transition to another type.

"It's turning out to be a true collaboration," Zaera says. "We know that in order to succeed, we need to exchange expertise--and that means sharing our people and lab equipment."

National laboratories also play a role in the new initiative. David A. Dixon and six other scientists from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have teamed up with Iglesia's group at UC Berkeley and researchers at Sandia National Laboratories; Washington State University; and the University of Texas, Austin.

One of the team's objectives is to prepare transition-metal oxide catalysts with a very high degree of structural uniformity. Iglesia explains that the goal is to permit the new materials to be analyzed with advanced computational and experimental techniques while avoiding the shortcomings of ensemble averaging typically associated with materials with broad distributions of structures. Initially, the group plans to focus on catalysts for simple redox and acid-base reactions and then apply the results to more complex reactions, such as selective oxidation of alkanes and isomerization-alkylation of alkanes.

As with the other groups, the team-building goal stated by BES is being achieved by putting together the metal-oxide catalysts team. "The project has brought together people who normally would not work together," Iglesia points out. "It is an assembly point for a broad and powerful range of expertise." The group includes experts in several areas, including synthesis of ordered mesoporous materials, computational chemistry, experimental chemical physics, surface science and spectroscopy, and physical organic chemistry.

In Europe, there's no talk of "new modes" of catalysis funding. In fact, one of the newest sources of would-be research funds--the European Union's Sixth Framework Program--just gave catalysis the thumbs down. Some 13 billion euros (nearly $15 billion) is being appropriated for various types of research in the current round of funding, according to an EU website. But none of that money is slated for catalysis-based projects (as opposed to projects that include an incidental catalysis research effort). As expected, catalysis researchers throughout the EU are disappointed by the still unofficial yet widely publicized outcome of the funding action.

"There is a general complaint by the people who submitted proposals that the judgment of the referees was focused more on integration than on scientific merit," remarks Jean-Marie Basset. Basset is director of the Laboratory for Organometallic Surface Chemistry, which is run jointly by the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and the University of Chemistry, Physics & Electronics (CPE) in Lyon, France.

Basset organized one of three proposals for Networks of Excellence in catalysis that were evaluated in the Sixth Framework Program's final round of decision-making. The proposed networks are large, integrated research teams made up of scientists and engineers from more than a dozen institutions across the EU. As proposed, the networks would serve as virtual laboratories in which researchers could move freely from one location to another, as required by their research needs, to make use of a network's wide-ranging expertise and equipment.

Avelino Corma says the European catalysis community is quite surprised that none of the proposed networks and none of the so-called integrated projects based on catalysis research are being funded. Corma, who is involved in two of the proposed catalysis networks, is a research director at the Institute of Chemical Technology at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, in Spain. "Perhaps the EU feels that catalysis is a mature discipline and other emerging fields are in greater need of support," Corma surmises.

Separately, both Basset and Corma are scheduled to meet in Brussels with representatives of the EU commission responsible for science funding to discuss the funding decisions and to make suggestions for the future. Corma expects catalysis will be given higher priority in the next round of funding.

European scientists say there is some preliminary discussion of merging the catalysis networks proposed for the Sixth Framework Program into a single orchestrated research effort for the next major round of funding. But several researchers stress that despite the EU's good intentions in unifying and integrating scientists across Europe, managing collaborations of more than a dozen institutions requires tremendous effort and time. They add that such large teams are likely to be less beneficial than expected by the EU.

Regardless of the official results of the Sixth Framework Program, funds from earlier and other types of EU programs still support some catalysis research in Europe. The fraction of EU support varies from country to country and from lab to lab. But no matter whether the fraction is large or small, catalysis research in many of Europe's laboratories is widely recognized as world class, indicating that catalysis research is, in fact, well supported in Europe.

FOR MANY EUROPEAN catalysis labs, the bulk of the funding comes from national sources and industry. For example, Corma says that funds from Spain's science ministry account for roughly 25% of his research support, while nearly 50% comes from industry partners. The other 25% comes mainly from EU sources, he says.

In Basset's group of 45 researchers, about one-third are permanent staff members whose salaries are paid by CNRS or by CPE. Basset notes that the majority of the other funds for his research effort come from industry.

Jens K. Nørskov, a physics professor at Technical University of Denmark, Lingby, depends primarily on the Danish National Research Foundation to support his research program. Nørskov explains that 10 years ago the Danish government instituted a funding scheme in which research consortia, teams of research groups, could compete for stable long-term funding. "We have benefited from that program enormously," he says. Nørskov's group, which focuses primarily on computational surface chemistry, is part of a consortium that includes the research group of Aarhus University physics professor Flemming Besenbacher and other scientists.

Nørskov points out that he has obtained research funds from other sources, such as industry and some EU programs. But in his experience, those sources amount to "a nice addition, but not enough to secure a research group's survival."

Similar to the situation in Denmark, many researchers in the Netherlands look to Dutch sources--not the EU--for the lion's share of their funding. "On the whole, it's rather easy to get money for catalysis research in Holland," says J. W. (Hans) Niemantsverdriet, a professor of chemical engineering and chemistry at Eindhoven University of Technology.

Niemantsverdriet estimates that nearly 50% of his support comes from the Foundation for Technical Sciences in the Netherlands, while research agreements with industry account for another 25%. The remainder of the financial support for his research program comes from the Netherlands Research Council and other Dutch scientific organizations, and some support comes directly from the university.

Close contacts between Dutch universities, companies, and government agencies have helped researchers in the Netherlands secure major support for catalysis research over the years. Nonetheless, "very little money is available nowadays for unrestricted fundamental investigations," Niemantsverdriet asserts. More support was available for that type of research 10 years ago, he says. That means that today, research directors cannot afford to take big risks in scientific research. And that's unfortunate, he adds, "because risky new areas are the ones in which you get surprises and real breakthroughs."

EXPERIMENTING Catalysis research in European labs, shown here for example at Delft University in the Netherlands, is supported primarily by national and industry sources--not by the EU. PHOTO BY MITCH JACOBY

Roel Prins, a professor of catalysis in the Laboratory for Technical Chemistry at ETH explains that much of the financial support for his catalysis research is supplied by the Swiss National Fund. But ETH, which is run by the Swiss federal government, enjoys special status in Switzerland, Prins points out. Unlike other schools, ETH receives considerable financial support from the government and does not compete with other schools for that money. In contrast, other schools in Switzerland compete with one another for funds that are distributed at the state level.

As in other countries, ETH scientists can raise research funds through industry grants, which may be matched by government sources. But academics at ETH enjoy additional funding that's unique in Switzerland to their institution and uncommon, in general, throughout the academic world. According to Prins, ETH has a long-established practice of setting aside some of the money given to the university each year by the Swiss government and doling out those funds competitively among the school's professors. "It's a kind of internal National Science Foundation," he says.

FURTHERMORE, ETH professors automatically receive funds each year from the university to pay the salaries of some number of group members. The funds are guaranteed throughout the professors' careers and are used at their discretion to support Ph.D. students, postdocs, or other research group members. "It's a fantastic source of funding," Prins says. "It gives us the flexibility to pursue whatever kind of research we choose."

Wherever it comes from, financial support for scientific research is essential to continue training today's young scientists for tomorrow's technical challenges. Whether the focus is on catalysis and its improvements in waste reduction and energy efficiency, or some other discipline, investments in research benefit more than just the people in the scientific world. As Eindhoven's Niemantsverdriet puts it, "Turning out excellent people who know what it means to push scientific and technological frontiers to the limit is the best product a university has to offer society."

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