[:el]
Manos Mavrikakis is a chemical engineer and the Paul A. Elfers Professor and a Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor at the College of Engineering of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, currently chairing the Department of Chemical Engineering. Thomson Reuters ranked him among the “Top 100 chemists for the 2000-2010 decade.
M. Mavrikakis received his diploma from the School of Chemical Engineering of the National Technical University of Athens and his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering and Scientific Computing from the University of Michigan–Ann Arbor in the United States. He then became a postdoc at the University of Delaware and the Marie-Curie postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Atomic-scale Materials Physics of the Technical University of Denmark.
“It was a very difficult decision to go away from home, right after college. At the time, telephone communication was very expensive for the stipend of a graduate student in the US, there was no email or internet, and I had to rely mostly on postal mail to keep up with family news and developments while I was pursuing my PhD” he explained in his interview at ellines.com.
In 1999, he became assistant professor at the College of Engineering of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and in 2005 he was assigned as associate professor. Three years later, M. Mavrikakis becomes Professor at the same university, a position he still keeps.
M. Mavrikakis and his group worked on understanding the detailed reaction mechanism of several industrially important reactions, such as methanol synthesis, Fischer–Tropsch synthesis, water-gas-shift reaction, direct synthesis of hydrogen peroxide, preferential oxidation of CO in the presence of hydrogen (PROX), reduction of NO by hydrogen and methanol/ethanol decomposition and reforming. They engage in significant collaboration with numerous experimental catalysis and surface science groups around the globe to elucidate the nature of the active site through a combined experimental and theoretical approach.
““Aristeia” and “Eugenis Amilla” are both key notions for upbringing the brightest minds to become leaders and innovators for the future; they need to be cultivated in the young minds by pursuing classical studies in middle and high school, in parallel with rigorous training in math and sciences” he added.
During his career, Manos Mavrikakis won the 2009 “Paul H. Emmett Award” in Fundamental Catalysis from the North American Catalysis Society, the 2014 “R.H. Wilhelm Award” in Chemical Reaction Engineering from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers and the 2002 “National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award”.
He is a member of the editorial board of ACS Catalysis, AIChE Journal, Catalysis Today, ChemPhysChem, and editor-in-Chief of Surface Science.
[:]
