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World-Renowned Researcher Awarded Hans Christian Ørsted Gold Medal for Outstanding Contributions

By iednewsdesk On Mar 20, 2024

There can be no green transition without Power-to-X. There can be no Power-to-X without catalysis. And when talking about catalysis, Jens Kehlet Nørskov’s name is bound to pop up. The now 71-year-old professor at DTU Physics is impossible to ignore when it comes to finding alternatives to fossil fuels – and this is where catalysis comes in. It plays a vital role in the technology that could potentially save the world from the overconsumption of fossil fuels and the resulting carbon emissions that lead to an increasingly warmer planet.

World-class Danish research

Jens Kehlet Nørskov’s CV boasts a long list of distinctions and counts several national and international awards, including the Niels Bohr International Gold Medal. On 22 March 2024, the list of distinctions will have to make room for one more. On this date, Jens Kehlet Nørskov will receive the Hans Christian Ørsted Gold Medal in the field of physics. The medal is awarded for excellent scientific work – world-class research, to be precise, as described on the website of the award-presenter, the Society for the Dissemination of Natural Science.

There can be little doubt the professor’s research is world-class when looking at the international Highly Cited Researchers ranking, which is compiled annually by the research and analysis organization Clarivate. The list ranks the researchers who have published the 1 per cent most cited articles in their field. And Jens Kehlet Nørskov is included every year. In 2017, he was also named Clarivate Citation Laureate, an honour bestowed upon researchers Clarivate considers likely candidates for a Nobel Prize.

Professor Jens Kehlet Nørskov received the 2018 Niels Bohr International Gold Medal, which was presented by H.M. Queen Margrethe. Photo: Lars Svankjær

Memory lane

Physicist and chemist Jens Kehlet Nørskov is a graduate of Aarhus University, where he also completed his PhD project in theoretical physics in 1979. It was his inspiring PhD supervisor, Bengt Lundqvist, who sparked Jens Kehlet Nørskov’s interest in catalysis.

Catalysis is a process that accelerates a chemical reaction. The substance that makes this possible is called a catalyst. This means that much of the research into catalysis is also about finding the substances that are suitable as catalysts. Catalysis is involved in numerous industrial processes. According to the catalysis company Topsoe, catalysts are involved in 90 per cent of all commercially manufactured products – from fertilizers and furniture to the fuel in our cars.

When Jens Kehlet Nørskov chose the catalysis route, there was no map of the journey.

“Catalysis was a completely new territory. We understood very little at the time. We had mastered the practical process of catalysis, but there were no theoretical methods or any systematic understanding of what defines a good catalyst. So, we had to develop all that, and that’s what I’ve been working on all these years,” says Jens Kehlet Nørskov.

His driving force has always been the desire to build the theoretical foundation for catalysis.

“My biggest revelations have been when I suddenly realize a connection and can use it to build a theoretical framework, which can then explain lots of observations that we couldn’t make sense of before. Catalysis is quite complex, and it’s not a simple task to distill it into something useful that can predict whether the same process can be used in practice,” says Jens Kehlet Nørskov.

Technical University of Denmark