Preface to A Close Look at Catalysis at Surfaces: A Special Issue in Honor of Prof. Norbert Kruse on the Occasion of his
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PREFACE
Preface to A Close Look at Catalysis at Surfaces: A Special Issue in Honor of Prof. Norbert Kruse on the Occasion of his 70th Birthday Thierry Visart de Bocarmé1 · Cédric Barroo1 Accepted: 2 November 2020 / Published online: 16 November 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
This special issue of “Topics in Catalysis” has been set up to celebrate a scientist, a mentor, and a friend Professor Norbert Kruse on the occasion of his 70th birthday (Fig. 1). Norbert Kruse was conferred a doctoral degree from the Technical University of Berlin after research studies at the Fritz-Haber-Institut der Max Planck Gesellschaft in Berlin. He previously received a diploma in chemistry and chemical engineering from the same university. Norbert pursued his passion for research at the ETH Zurich where he later became a lecturer. In 1994, he moved to Belgium to the Université libre de Bruxelles where he was appointed full professor and became an internationally recognized researcher and group leader in the area of surface science and heterogeneous catalysis. Since 2013, Norbert holds a joint appointment at Washington State University as Voiland Distinguished Professor in the Gene and Linda Voiland School of Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering, and at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Norbert is currently leading a research group with a strong focus on applied heterogeneous catalysis with the development of sustainable catalytic processes by using renewable feedstocks. It is fair to say that to reach this ultimate goal, Norbert took the challenge from different and complementary perspectives. During his doctoral studies, Norbert has been mentored by professor Jochen H. Block, a pioneering inventor in the application of field emission methods to the investigation of surface processes at the atomic scale. With the emergence of commercially available scanning probe microscopies in the late eighties, field emission/ion microscopies gradually became less popular. Many would have forecasted a complete loss of that heritage. However, this * Thierry Visart de Bocarmé [email protected] * Cédric Barroo [email protected] 1
Université Libre de Bruxelles, Avenue Franklin Roosevelt 50, CP243, 1050 Brussels, Belgium
Fig. 1 Prof. Norbert Kruse
was not to discourage Norbert who never in his career fell in the easiness of mainstream research themes. Accordingly, he became one of the very few on this planet to master those methods, and more importantly, to teach them to the next generations to which we, guest editors, belong. This perseverance certainly led Norbert to be elected president of the International Field emission Society from 2008 to 2014. For some years, field emission methods become exponentially popular through the atom-probe tomography, one of the very few methods able to bridge the nanoworld with the materials science. More recently, an increased attention is being paid to the influence of the local electric field on reactions and surface reactions. This is no
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