Dr. Fabio Ribeiro, the R. Norris and Eleanor Shreve Professor of Chemical Engineering at Purdue University and Director of CISTAR, has been selected to receive the 2019 Giuseppe Parravano Memorial Award for Excellence in Catalysis Research. He will receive the award during the 40^th annual Michigan Catalysis Society (MC-NACS) Spring Symposium to be held on May 7 at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan.

Dr. Ribeiro was chosen for his outstanding insight into catalytic reactions gained from fundamental kinetic analysis of innovatively designed and meticulously executed experiments. He will present an Award Keynote Lecture during the Symposium titled, “The Role of Kinetics in the Search for the Active Site in Heterogeneous Catalysis.”

Dr. Ribeiro joined the Davidson School of Chemical Engineering in 2003. He earned his B.S. in Chemical Engineering and M.S. in Chemistry at the Instituto Militar de Engenharia, Brazil. He then received his M.S. and PhD in Chemical Engineering from Stanford University. He was a Research Fellow at Catalytica Inc., in Mountain View, California. He also held the position of Postdoctoral Fellow at U.C. Berkeley (Chemistry) and Lawrence National Laboratory, Berkeley.

In 2017, Dr. Ribeiro became Director of the National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center for Innovative and Strategic Transformation of Alkane Resources (CISTAR). He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Herman Pines Award from the Catalysis Club of Chicago (2015), AIChE Fellow (2014), and the Purdue College of Engineering Faculty Awards of Excellence for Research (2014).

The Guiseppe Parravano Award for Excellence in Catalysis Research recognizes outstanding contributions to catalytic science and technology, and is given bi-annually in odd-numbered years and recognizes any researcher within North America for outstanding achievement in the conduct of clever, productive, and influential research on problems of central interest and importance in catalysis and related fields.