Bert Sels - Biography#

Bert F. Sels (1972), currently full professor at KU Leuven, obtained his Ph.D. in 2000 in the field of heterogeneous oxidation catalysis under the guidance of professor Pierre Jacobs. He was awarded the DSM Chemistry Award in 2000, the Incentive Award by the Belgian Chemical Society in 2005, and the Green Chemistry Award in La Rochelle in 2015.
He was director of the Centre for Surface Chemistry and Catalysis (COK) during the period of 2015-2018, and founded in 2019 at KULeuven a new division called the ‘Center for Sustainable Catalysis and Engineering, CSCE’. He is founder of the Spin-Off company Zeopore developing zeolite-based catalysts.

Professor Sels’ research activities encompass the design of heterogeneous catalysts for future challenges in industrial organic and environmental catalysis. His group has about 350 peer reviewed papers with an h index of 88, more than 26 690 citations (google scholar, 2020), and he wrote 30 patents. His expertise includes heterogeneous catalysis in biorefineries and biofactories, design of hierarchically structured materials such as zeolites and carbons, and leads research on the spectroscopic identification and kinetics of catalytically active sites for small molecule activation.

He was appointed active member of the Research Council of the University (2015-2019). He was co-chair of the Catalysis Commission of the International Zeolite Association (IZA) from 2014 to 2019, and co-founder of the European Research Institute of Catalysis (ERIC). He is member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, visiting professor in the Chinese Academy of Sciences, member of the international advisory board of ChemSusChem (Wiley), ChemCatChem (Wiley), and he is currently associate editor of ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering (ACS).

You may discover more details of his research at http://www.sels-group.eu