Physcial Sciences Division
Research Highlights

September 2021

Morris Bullock to Be Honored as First National Laboratory Scientist to Receive American Chemical Society Award in Organometallic Chemistry

Bullock to be honored with 2022 ACS Award after more than 35 years of research

Morris Bullock

The American Chemical Society (ACS) will honor Morris Bullock with the coveted 2022 ACS Award in Organometallic Chemistry as the first national laboratory employee to receive the award. Bullock is a Laboratory Fellow and chemist in the Physical Sciences Division at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), the director of the Center for Molecular Electrocatalysis, an Energy Frontier Research Center led by PNNL, and associate director of PNNL's Institute for Integrated Catalysis.

The ACS Award recognizes a recent advancement that is having a major impact on research in organometallic chemistry. "The work we've been doing is trying to understand reactivity at a fundamental level. Much of our focus is on metal hydrides, as they are used in a huge array of important industrial reactions," said Bullock. "Our recent efforts have been on the design of catalysts that convert between chemical energy and electrical energy."

In ongoing research, Bullock and his team are applying what they have learned about catalytic production and oxidation of hydrogen to study how to oxidize ammonia and use the energy stored in the nitrogen-hydrogen bond as a carbon-neutral energy source.

Bullock is an elected fellow of the ACS, the Royal Society of Chemistry, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and was elected to the Washington State Academy of Sciences in 2018. Despite his distinguished career, Bullock shares the credit for this award with DOE-BES for funding his research for more than 35 years, and credits his colleagues at PNNL for their work.

"Even though it's an individual award, it really is the result of teamwork. I am fortunate to have dedicated, creative colleagues here that I work closely with. It's the teamwork of a national lab environment that makes a big difference and enables all this work to happen," said Bullock.

The ACS will present the award to Bullock at the society’s ACS Spring 2022 meeting in San Diego, CA on March 22, 2022.