Sponsored by the Canadian Catalysis Foundation
The Catalysis Award is presented to an individual who, while residing in Canada, has made a distinguished contribution to the field of catalysis. This award is presented every two years.
The 2026 awards are now open for submission.
Nominate yourself or a colleague deserving of recognition.
Press release: Award winners will be recognized at the x2026 Conference.
View the Terms of Reference and list of Past Winners
The 2024 winner of the Catalysis Award is:
Douglas Stephan, FCIC
University of Toronto
Doug Stephan earned his BSc at McMaster (1976) and PhD at UWO (1980). After a NATO PDF (Harvard), he began his career at the University of Windsor (1982) and became full Professor(1992), a NSERC Industrial Research Chair (2001), University Professor (2002) and Canada Research Chair (2005). In 2008 he moved to the University of Toronto as Professor and Canada Research Chair, became a University Professor (2018) and named the J.C. Polanyi Chair in Chemistry (2023). In 2020, he established a satellite laboratory at Ningbo University as a Zhedong Scholar Chair Professor. He was an Associated Editor and Chair of the board for Chemical Society Reviews and has been the Chair of the editorial board of Chemical Communications since 2020.
A world-leading researcher in inorganic chemistry, he is best known as the founder of the field of “frustrated Lewis pair” (FLP) chemistry. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society (London), a Corresponding Member of North-Rhein-Westfaelia Academy of the Sciences and Arts (Germany) and was an Einstein Visiting Fellow at TU Berlin. He won the 2019 J. C. Polanyi Award from NSERC, a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship, the 2021 Killam Prize in Science and the 2022 Cotton Award from the ACS.