Alexis T. Bell

Alexis Tarassov Bell (born October 16, 1942) is an American chemical engineer. He is currently the Dow professor of Sustainable Chemistry in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering in UC Berkeley's college of chemistry. He is known for his work with heterogenous catalysts and characterizing the mechanisms of these reactions on a quantum level.

Early life and education Bell was born on October 16, 1942, in New York City, the only child of immigrant parents. Bell joined the Chemical Engineering Faculty at UC Berkeley after getting his PhD in 1967. In the 1970s, Bell started his work in catalysis; Bell also held a workshop of the report Catalysis Looks to the Future, which had many reports presented to the house and senate committees dealing with science and technology. Bell looked at the oxidation/reduction of certain COx and NOx through absorption on metal catalysts. This could help lower the CO pollution that was found coming out of automobiles. One of Bell's most impactful work from the 1970s was the identification of surface structures on a silver catalyst during the oxidation of ethylene. He was able to provide a mechanism of the epoxidation process and qualitatively explain the kinetics of the oxidation reaction. From this work he continued on looking at CO and CO2 hydrocarbon synthesis over silica-Ru catalysts. The main purpose of this work was to truly understand the rate determining steps and how hydrocarbons form at the silica-Ru surface from Fischer-Tropsch synthesis.

In the 1980s, Bell continued looking at Fischer-Tropsch synthesis over Ru catalysts to look at the growth of hydrocarbon chains based from carbon monoxide hydrogenation to methanol. This work helped Bell determine the key rate-determining steps happening at the surface of the metal catalyst. Bell's work started looking at mathematical based methods to describe resist spin coating. These models combined with the growth of hydrocarbons over metal catalysts lead to his work on silica surfaces, which lead to his work on zeolites. By the end of the 1980s, Bell was incorporating Raman and NMR spectroscopy techniques to analyze zeolite structures in alumina-silicate solutions. He continued through the 1990s looking at zeolites as catalysts and different adsorption of aromatic hydrocarbons on the surface. Bell was able to thermodynamically and mechanistically describe the absorption of aromatic hydrocarbons on the surface of silicate zeolites. Bell wanted to study reduction and oxidation reactions of hydrocarbons on aluminosilicate zeolite surfaces. By the end of the 1990s, Bell had come up with techniques that allowed him to synthesize these aluminosilicate zeolites and identify the species involved in synthesis through NMR techniques.

In the early 2000, Bell submitted his work on heterogenous catalysts and could describe the reduction and oxidation of nanoparticles through catalytic reactions to reduce the amount CO pollution. His current research work is being done on the quantum models of thin film catalysts. Bell's research also went on to look at the electrochemical evolution of oxygen and found how metals could enhance the metal oxide activity for the electrochemical evolution. Bell continues to find efficient ways of catalyzing the electrolysis of water using quantum models to analyze the absorbed species on the metal catalyzed by different spectroscopic techniques. Bell has been a pioneer throughout the years working on oxidation/reduction reactions of CO and NO to understand the selectivity and limiting factors.

Honors and awards Curtis W. McGraw Award for Research, American Association of Engineering Education The Professional Progress and R. H. Wilhelm Awards, the American Institute of Chemical Engineers Paul H. Emmett Award in Fundamental Catalysis, Catalysis Society National Academy of Engineering (1987) Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1988) the ACS Award for Creative Research in Homogeneous or Heterogeneous Catalysis, ACS (2001) Honorary professor, Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences (2001) William H. Walker Award of the AIChE (2005) Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2007) NACS Award for Distinguished Service in the Advancement of Catalysis (2018)