Rate My Professor Shiju Raveendran

Dr. N.R. (Shiju Raveendran) Shiju serves as Associate Professor of Catalysis Engineering at the Van 't Hoff Institute for Molecular Sciences within the Faculty of Science at the University of Amsterdam, where he leads the Catalysis Engineering Group. He obtained his PhD in Heterogeneous Catalysis from the National Chemical Laboratory in Pune, India. His academic career centers on advancing sustainable chemical processes through the design and application of solid catalysts. Key research areas include heterogeneous catalysis, CO2 utilization, biomass conversion to chemicals such as glycerol and lactic acid derivatives, chemical recycling of plastics, nanomaterials, and energy-related catalysis. The group's efforts integrate materials science, chemical science, and reactor engineering to investigate catalyst structures using advanced techniques like XAS, XPS, aberration-corrected electron microscopy, and solid-state NMR. They conduct reactions in batch and flow reactors targeting industrial relevance, encompassing petrochemicals, lower alkanes, graphene-based coatings, chemical intermediates from polycyclic aromatics, sustainable cyclohexyl amine synthesis, green plasma chemistry, catalytic production of green methanol from CO2, and new catalysts for ammoximation.

Shiju Raveendran has earned recognition through awards including the Science Park New Idea Prize in 2010 for developing a new catalyst for nylon production, the Emerging Investigator Award in 2017, and the Prof. J.N. Mukherjee Memorial Award in 2023 from the Indian Chemical Society. He co-edits the Elsevier journal Sustainable Chemistry for Climate Action, focusing on solutions for climate action including carbon capture technologies. His prolific publication record features highly cited works such as Antagonistic Catalysis: Creating a Bifunctional and Tunable Acid-Base Catalyst (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., 2011), Glycerol valorization: dehydration to acrolein over silica-supported niobia catalysts (Top. Catal., 2010), Highly efficient nickel-niobia composite catalysts for hydrogenation of CO2 to methane (Chem. Eng. Sci., 2018), Designing effective solid catalysts for biomass conversion: Aerobic oxidation of ethyl lactate to ethyl pyruvate (Green Chem., 2018), Ti3AlC2 MAX-phase as an efficient catalyst for oxidative dehydrogenation of n-butane (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., 2018), and Highly selective oxidation of ethyl lactate to ethyl pyruvate catalysed by mesoporous vanadia–titania (ACS Catal., 2018). With over 6,500 citations on Google Scholar, his contributions have profoundly influenced catalysis engineering and sustainable chemistry.