Jens K. Norskov

Professor Jens K. Norskov holds the Leland T. Edwards Professorship in Engineering at Stanford University. He is a professor of the departments of chemical engineering and photon science and the director of SUNCAT Center for Interface Science and Catalysis at SLAC and Stanford University. Prof. Norskov received his PhD in theoretical physics at the University of Aarhus, Denmark in 1979. Following his PhD, he served as a research fellow and post doctoral researcher and staff scientist at several institutions including IBM T. J. Watson Research Center and Haldor Tops?e. In 1987 he started as research professor at the Technical University of Denmark and was named professor of physics in 1992. In 2010, he moved to Stanford University and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.

Prof. Norskov is a pioneer on understanding trends in catalyst activity and developing catalyst design principles based on reactivity descriptors. He and his co-workers have contributed extensively to the development of computational methods and models of surface reactivity. Prof. N?rskov has introduced what is today a standard model of transition metal reactivity and has used it to explain trends in adsorption energies and in the activation energies of elementary processes on transition metal catalysts in terms of variations in the d-band center and other parameters characterizing the properties of surface electrons. Prof. N?rskov has quantified Br?nsted-Evans-Polanyi (BEP) relations and showed how they lead to predictive models that relate catalytic reactivity to adsorption energies of key relevant species. The methods developed for use in heterogeneous catalysis have been successfully transferred into the area of electrocatalysis. Most recently, his research group has introduced the first database of surface chemical properties and developed publicly available software to access and mine thermodynamic and catalytic data on active surfaces, thus opening novel opportunities for discovering trends and for designing new catalysts and catalytic processes. Prof. N?rskov published approximately 450 papers (cited more than 50,000 times, H-index 116; ISI, April 2015), 13 patents or patent applications.