Basic research at the highest level: Prof. Ferdi Schüth receives award

Catalysis Society honors Mülheim chemist with the Alwin Mittasch Prize

Prof. Ferdi Schüth, Director at the Max-Planck-Institut für Kohlenforschung, has been awarded the Alwin Mittasch Prize by the German Catalysis Society for his outstanding work. The award ceremony will take place during the Annual Meeting of German Catalysis Experts in Weimar.

Prof. Ferdi Schüth, Director at the Max-Planck-Institut für Kohlenforschung in Mülheim an der Ruhr, has been awarded the 2025 Alwin Mittasch Prize by the German Catalysis Society (GeCatS). The prize will be awarded in March at the Annual Meeting of German Catalysis Scientists in Weimar. According to GeCatS, it is “awarded for outstanding research that has led to a deeper understanding or broadening of the fundamentals of catalysis and its industrial application”.

Paul Alwin Mittasch was a German chemist who grew up in Saxony in the 19th century. He was known for his work at BASF, where he initially worked as an assistant to Carl Bosch. At the beginning of the 20th century, he began the search for a catalyst for ammonia production based on iron oxide – successfully. The catalyst he developed enabled large-scale ammonia synthesis and is still in use today, almost unchanged.

Mittasch is not only accountable for that catalyst for ammonia production mentioned above. He was also responsible, among other things, for the catalytic ammonia oxidation for nitric acid production and a process for the extraction of pure nickel. In total, Mittasch and his team have registered 85 different patents.

According to the jury, Ferdi Schüth is an internationally outstanding chemist. His work has laid the foundation for many groundbreaking discoveries, for example for nanostructured catalysts with controlled porosity and targeted placement of functional units for various applications, such as fuel cell catalysis. In the field of mechanocatalysis, Ferdi Schüth and his team succeeded in synthesizing ammonia at room temperature and atmospheric pressure.

Moreover, Schüth was one of the pioneers of high-throughput experimentation (HTE) using modern methods – which led to the founding of hte GmbH in 1999 – and thus, to a certain extent, continued the research of Alwin Mittasch, who used “manual” high-throughput approaches to carry out thousands of experiments with various solids.