Prof. Notker Roesch, director of the Catalysis Research Center of the Technical University of Munich, visited the Lanzhou Institute of Chemical Physics (LICP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) on September 14. During his stay, Prof. Notker Roesch delivered a lecture entitled Catalytic Transformation of Hydrocarbons: From Fuel Efficiency of Renewables.

In his lecture, Prof. Notker Roesch introduced the scaling properties of metal particles, the possible routes of methanolysis on palladium catalysts, ligand-free palladium nano-particle catalyzed Heck coupling reaction and explained theoretically the loss of palladium catalysts during the reaction. The above work is significant for the understanding of reaction mechanisms during catalytic processes from the atomic level. Prof. Notker Roesch also introduced the research on new catalytic materials, green catalysis, energy catalysis carried out by the Catalysis Research Center and the international cooperation of the Center.

Prof. Notker Roesch’s research interests lie in the quantum chemical research on the electronic structure of complex systems usingdensity functional theory (DFT) and he has made remarkable achievements in the theoretical research of surface chemistry. He has more than 400 publications and in 2009 he was accepted as a member of the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Prof. Notker Roesch was invited by the R&D Center for Green Chemistry and Catalysis of the LICP.