About the author
Ever since I was a small boy, I have been fascinated by science and I had no doubt that I would become a scientist. My first encounter with my life-long interest, catalysis, (now fairly widely understood because of the application of catalysts in car exhaust purification) was when I was in my final year at high school and the concept of catalysis was introduced by one of my chemistry teachers as a poorly understood phenomenon. I was fortunate that when I then went to Queen’s University, Belfast, the area of heterogeneous catalysis and surface chemistry was one of the main research interests in the Department of Chemistry and I was able to work on the subject for my PhD, following it further as a young academic in Bradford (UK) and later as a professor in the Universities of Twente (NL) and then Limerick (Ireland).
When I embarked on my career as an academic researcher in catalysis more than forty years ago, communication between scientists active in the field was predominantly by way of papers distributed over a wide range of professional journals, there being only one or two dealing specifically with catalysis. Towards the end of the 1970’s, there emerged a feeling that a new journal was needed and I became involved in the launch of Applied Catalysis, published by Elsevier Science Publishers: I took on, for a period of almost twenty years, the task of Editor of News Brief, a regular newsletter aimed at those working in the area. News Brief not only provided news of forthcoming meetings and published book reviews and meeting reports but it also included snippets of news on all aspects of catalysis, these being gathered from a team of correspondents from all over the world. Then, in the 1980’s, Catalysis Today, of which I became the Editor, was hived off from the rapidly expanding Applied Catalysis to publish the proceedings of small specialist meetings, collections of reviews and monographs. Through these activities, as well as through the work of my research group, I have been very fortunate to have been able to build up a very large circle of friends and scientific contacts and to extend my knowledge of the subject of catalysis, from surface science to catalyst materials to the applications of catalysis. I have also had to move continuously with the times and to progress into the electronic age as a full user of internet-based resources. This book is an attempt to condense some of the experience that I have gained into a text that might benefit the next generation of scientists working in the field. I hope that the book will achieve its aims and that you, the reader, will share your experience of its use with me so that some of this information can be passed on through this web site and even, if the demand is high enough, in subsequent editions of the book.
Julian Ross
Galway
January 2012
