Ruzicka Prize 2024 for Murielle Delley
Towards sustainable catalysis: On February 14, 2025, Prof. Murielle Delley will receive the 2024 Ruzicka Prize for her work on the controlled surface modification of cobalt phosphide with sulfur. ?
It is no secret: chemical production has always strived for efficient, cost-effective processes. Catalysts play an important role in this. However, many are not understood well and contain materials that are not sustainable.
Murielle Delley's research focuses on how catalysts function chemically, how to control their function, and how catalysts for certain processes – e.g. for electrolysis in hydrogen production – can be produced more specifically and sustainably. Although it is already possible to observe how a material behaves, huge gaps remain in our knowledge at the molecular level. Sulfur, e.g., plays a major role in transition metal phosphide-based catalysts in the field of electrocatalysis and hydrotreating, but its function was barely understood.
Murielle Delley took the first major steps towards closing this gap. Together with her group she produced cobalt phosphides (CoP) and attached sulfur to its surface using molecular methods. The sulfur was quantified and analyzed. The result was a series of catalysts that could be tested for catalysis. The group could infer the thermochemical properties of sulfur at the surface, which shed light on the function of sulfur in these catalytic reactions. This opens new avenues for catalyst design.
In the future, Delley would like to deepen her understanding of catalyst surfaces and also investigate the role of interfacial electric fields in catalysis.
Learn more about Murielle Delley's research in this article and on the Ruzicka Prize website, and join us for the award ceremony (see box below).
Murielle Delley studied chemistry at ETH Zurich and completed her PhD with Prof. Christophe Copéret in 2017. For her thesis “Molecular-Level Understanding of Structure and Reactivity of Isolated Chromium Sites on Oxide Surfaces”, Delley got the Prix Schlaefli 2019 in Chemistry. After a postdoc at Yale University with Prof. James M. Mayer, Delley started her career at the Department of Chemistry at the University Basel (Branco Weiss fellow, PRIMA professor of the Swiss National Science Foundation) and was appointed tenure-track assistant professor in 2023.
The Ruzicka Prize, named after the ETH professor and Nobel laureate Leopold Ruzicka, is one of the most important awards for the promotion of young scientists in the field of chemistry in Switzerland. Since 1957, it has been awarded annually by the Department of Chemistry and Applied Biosciences at ETH Zurich - usually in the fall, but this time the event has been postponed to spring. The prize is endowed with 10,000 CHF and is sponsored by dsm-firmenich.
Ruzicka Prize Ceremony
"Towards Sustainable Catalysis: Tackling the Challenges of Site Distribution and Entangled Interfacial Effects at Catalytic Surfaces."
The Ruzicka Award Ceremony and Talk 2024 will take place on February 14, 2025, 5-6 pm in the HCI building, H?nggerberg, lecture hall J3.
Program:
- Welcoming & Laudatio: Prof. Dr. Christophe Copéret
- Lecture: Prof. Dr. Murielle Delley
- Award Ceremony: Prof. Dr. Christan Wolfrum