The Catalysis Innovation Consortium (CIC) held its first annual meeting September 21-23 on the Emory Campus.
The Consortium is the living legacy of the NSF Center for Selective C-H Functionalization (CCHF). The NSF-funded center, led by Dr. Huw Davies, engaged academic and industryin STEM, used to refer to the field of work that applies sci... partners in the pursuit of innovative methods for the construction of organic molecules that underpin chemical solutions in manufacturing and medicine. When the CCHF was reaching fruition, a large number of academic and industrial scientists from within and outside the CCHF wanted to have see the community continue. This led to the creation of the Catalysis Innovation Consortium (formerly “Beyond CCHF”) as the umbrella organization for these ongoing efforts.
The CIC currently includes 41 research groups from 28 universities as well as 5 industrial partners with expertise covering broad areas of catalysis: new enabling technologies, industrial applications, sustainable catalysis, bio-inspired catalysis, high throughput experimentation, catalysts design, predictive modeling, and machine learning.
The first day of the Annual Meeting was open to the whole Emory community and included an industrial symposium with talks from AbbVie, Novartis, FMC, and GSK. Tim Cernak from the University of Michigan gave the keynote talk on high throughput experimentation and machine learning. About 120 people attended the talks and a subsequent poster session in the chemistry department featuring 55 posters.
Meetings on Friday and Saturday were held at the Emory Conference Center Hotel and focused on the Catalysis Innovation Consortium community. The 125 in-person attendees included 25 faculty from 20 universities nationwide. Members recapped accomplishments to-date and brainstormed future plans for the consortium.
”It was a highly productive meeting with great engagement from the Emory faculty and students,” shares CIC Managing Director Dr. Alan J. Bailey. “It places us in a promising position to build on the positive momentum that was generated over the three days.”
Congratulations to Alan, Dr. Huw Davies, and to all who took part!