Events & Announcements:

Professor Maria Flytzani-Stephanopoulos Spends Sabbatical Year at ETH in Zürich

Professor Flytzani-Stephanopoulos spent the 2006-07 academic year at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zürich. There, she interacted with Professor Alfons Baiker and his group of students and senior researchers in the area of heterogeneous catalysis of gold, specifically for the selective oxidation of alcohols and for the water-gas shift and fuel oxidation reactions for energy applications. While in Europe, Professor Flytzani-Stephanopoulos visited several university laboratories and gave talks to a large number of students/researchers in the environmental catalysis and energy fields. During the fall of 2006 she was an academic guest at the Danish Technical University in Lyngby, Denmark, where she gave a talk and developed new research contacts. In October, she gave the plenary lecture at the 9th Panhellenic Catalysis Society meeting in Lefkas, Greece. A trip back to the US in November was spent with her group at Tufts as well as presenting papers and chairing sessions at the annual AIChE meeting in San Francisco.

Last March she delivered the plenary lecture at the Colloquium on Catalytic Hydrogen Generation organized by the Nanostructured Interfaces and Surfaces Center of Excellence, University of Torino, Italy. She then came to New York to deliver the keynote lecture at the Spring Symposium of the Catalysis Society of Metropolitan New York. In April, she spent a week at Queens University Belfast, and gave a talk at CenTACat on her research in fuel processing and fuel cells. Professor Flytzani-Stephanopoulos returned to Tufts for most of May to see three of her graduate students finish their theses and receive their degrees. At the last faculty meeting of the academic year, she was honored with the Tufts University Distinguished Scholar award. More presentations followed in Washington, D.C. at the DOE/BES Hydrogen Fuel Initiative Program, and in Houston at the 20th NAM of the North American Catalysis Society. Back in Zürich, she was an invited seminar speaker in the Mechanical Engineering Department of the ETH; and then she traveled to Sifnos, Greece to give a keynote lecture on environmental catalysis at the International Symposium on Hydrocarbon Catalysis and Catalytic Engineering: Present Status and Perspectives, honoring Prof. Iakovos Vasalos.

Now, back in the US, Prof. Stephanopoulos says she's ready for some "less hectic" activities, preparing for her classes in the fall and writing new papers with her students.