Ive Hermans

Ive Hermans is the John and Dorothy Vozza and Evan P. and Marion Helfaer Professor in the Department of Chemistry and a Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He obtained his M.Sc. in 2002, Ph.D. in 2006 under the supervision of Profs. Pierre Jacobs and Jozef Peeters, and postgraduate degree in Business Administration in 2006 from K.U.Leuven, Belgium. After a postdoctoral position with Prof. Alfons Baiker, he served as Assistant Professor for heterogeneous catalysis at ETH Zurich starting in 2008. In 2013, he joined the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he leads a multidisciplinary team of chemists and chemical engineers addressing challenges in sustainable chemistry and catalysis engineering. His research focuses on the sustainable synthesis of chemicals using homogeneous and heterogeneous catalysts, including the development of catalytic materials, elucidation of reaction mechanisms through in situ spectroscopy, chemical kinetics, reaction engineering, and computational predictions of reactivity. He serves as Associate Editor of ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering.

Hermans has earned major awards including the ExxonMobil Chemical European Science & Engineering Award (2009), Emerging Research Award from the American Chemical Society Division of Energy and Fuels (2014), UW–Madison Postdoctoral Association Postdoc Mentoring Award (2016), Robert Augustine Award from the Organic Reactions Catalysis Society (2017), H.I. Romnes Faculty Fellow (2018-2019), ACS Ipatieff Prize (2019), ACS Fellow (2023), Royal Society of Chemistry Fellow (2024), AAAS Fellow (2024) for distinguished contributions to catalytic materials and reaction mechanisms using kinetic, spectroscopic, theoretical, and simulation approaches, and Foreign Member of the Royal Academy of Belgium (2025). Key publications include "Selective oxidative dehydrogenation of propane to propene using boron nitride catalysts" (Science, 2016), "Catalytic transfer hydrogenation/hydrogenolysis for reductive upgrading of furfural and 5-(hydroxymethyl)furfural" (ChemSusChem, 2014), "Simple and scalable preparation of highly active Lewis acidic Sn-β" (Angewandte Chemie International Edition, 2012), "Uncovering the Pressure-Dependent Mechanism of CO2 Hydrogenation to Methanol on Ga-Promoted Cu/ZrO2 Using Operando Modulation-Excitation DRIFTS" (Journal of the American Chemical Society, 2025), and "Preventing Loss of Selectivity During the Oxidative Dehydrogenation of Propane over Supported Vanadium Catalysts" (ACS Catalysis, 2025).

Professional Email: hermans@chem.wisc.edu