Physcial Sciences Division
Staff Awards & Honors
March 2008
C&E News Honors Catalysis Research
Congratulations to Pacific Northwest National Laboratory's Johnathan E. Holladay, Heather Brown and Z. Conrad Zhang and former post-doc Haibo Zhao on having their biomass research project selected as one of the most important research advances of 2007 by Chemical & Engineering News magazine. The team from the Laboratory's Institute for Integrated Catalysis discovered the most effective method yet to convert glucose, nature's abundant sugar, to hydroxymethylfurfural, a chemical that can be broken into components for products now made from petroleum.
The research was first reported in Science magazine and was made possible by the U.S. Department of Energy's Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, a national scientific user facility, at PNNL.