Award-winning chemist Jennifer Holmgren '81 believes that chemists can and do change the world.

The direct conversion of methane to methanol has been a dilemma stumping chemists for years. Those stubborn methane molecules are not easily converted to a different substance, and the current process—involving steam-reforming natural gas to synthesis gas, a reactor vessel, a nickel catalyst and very high temperatures—is costly. Both industry and the environment could benefit from the direct conversion, which could potentially reduce the amount of harmful greenhouse-impacting CO^2 and methane gas in the air.

Jennifer (Salem) Holmgren ’81 is managing a team of chemists at UOP LLC, in Des Plaines, Ill., to work on this very problem. UOP develops catalytic and other types of chemical technologies for licensing for the refining, petrochemical and gas processing industries. UOP’s technologies are mainly used to convert oil to fuels and chemicals, as well as the manufacture of plastics, detergents and fibers. As director of exploratory and fundamental research, Holmgren oversees three of UOP’s core groups: New Materials Synthesis, Combinatorial Chemistry and Advanced Characterization. By combining these capabilities, Holmgren hopes to change the economics of making methanol. “Then methanol can become a cheap liquid fuel or a much more important chemical intermediate than it is today. With all the available natural gas, we need to figure out how to more effectively utilize it,” she said.

Methanol has been used as fuel by the Indianapolis 500 since 1965, is an ideal hydrogen carrier fuel for fuel cell technology applications and an ideal turbine fuel for electric power generation. Although methanol has a lower energy content than gasoline, its octane rating is higher, resulting in better performance and acceleration in flexible fuel vehicles.

The potential to impact people’s daily lives is one reason Holmgren chose to work as an industrial chemist. A native of Colombia, Holmgren came to the U.S. in 1969 with her two siblings and parents, aviation industry workers. Encouraged by enthusiastic high school physics and chemistry teachers, Holmgren decided to pursue a degree in the sciences at HMC. Professor of Chemistry Emeritus Mitsuru Kubota, her senior thesis advisor, was another instrumental role model. “I’m certain that I became an inorganic chemist because I worked with him,” she said. “He spent a lot of time helping me think through the things I wanted to do.”

Jennifer married Donald Holmgren ’81, a physics major, the day before she graduated from Mudd in chemistry (linguistics minor), and together they attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. After receiving a Ph.D. in inorganic materials synthesis in 1987, she began working at UOP. Her assignments included the preparation and characterization of novel zeolites, molecular sieves and layered materials (clays, pillared clays and layered double hydroxides). She also developed microactivity tests for the characterization of novel materials and set up the infrastructure necessary to develop fundamental mechanistic understanding in UOP’s core areas.

In 2003, Holmgren became the first woman to receive the Malcolm E. Pruitt Award in recognition of her distinguished service to chemistry. She is noted for advancing the use of characterization methods and rapid experimentation techniques to develop fundamental insights into industrial catalysis, and for her successful efforts to extend UOP’s external collaborations in research, like the current project involving methane to methanol, which is being undertaken through a NIST Advanced Technology Program grant. Stan Gembicki, vice president of research and technology at UOP, whom Holmgren considers a mentor, remarked, “Her drive, resourcefulness and leadership have forged breakthroughs that epitomize innovation.”

Holmgren seeks out new capabilities—like combinatorial chemistry, advanced characterization, new materials and modeling—to bring about change in an industry that is central to everyone’s livelihood.

“When a field is mature, you can start to tackle problems the same way,” said Holmgren, the author or co-author of 50 U.S. patents and more than two dozen scientific publications. “If you have a limited number of tools it’s as if you’ve been looking at the problems with the same eyes—it isn’t fresh, it isn’t new. So that’s why I am a big believer in new tools, because I think new tools are almost like new eyes; they give you a new way of looking at the chemistry or the technology. The result is you come up with different ideas or different ways of doing things and that allows you to get off the existing innovation curve to create step changes.”

Holmgren is working toward the goal of creating a “virtual” research and development enterprise which allows her to tap talent at universities and national labs around the world for UOP projects. She also manages cross-functional teams at multiple companies, including global partnerships. The critical technology for UOP’s combinatorial chemistry program was developed in collaboration with the Norwegian independent research foundation SINTEF. The result was the first commercialized heterogeneous catalyst, PI-242, invented using combinatorial chemistry. The $40 million project was a true partnership, said Holmgren, who is a big advocate for globalization.

“By expanding the boundaries of your enterprise you can think much bigger, create much more and bring in new ideas,” she said. “I think the driver to become global is really the ability to access a global idea pipeline and then being able to access it. You can chase low costs all over the world, but the reason to park, to really start working seriously with other folks, is the ideas, the innovation and the ingenuity.”

Holmgren believes that the chemical industry has significant contributions to make toward creating a more sustainable future, especially creating a sustainable alternate energy supply. “I feel very strongly that chemists have to take a leadership role in developing the technologies that are going to lead to smaller environmental footprints,” she said. “I also think chemists need to think about the impact of what they’re developing and make sure there aren’t negative side effects.”

Not doing so leads to a bad name for all chemists, she said. “But if you look at raw materials feed stock utilization and emissions, chemists have had a huge impact in the past 10 years in creating more sustainable processes. They just need to take a bigger leadership role.”

Green chemistry is coming up more in chemists’ conversations, said Holmgren, and she’s happy to see this. But she believes the true change will come when industrial chemists and academic chemists become more aligned. “Sustainability is not about ‘green,’ it’s about social impact, economic impact, environmental impact. Nobody commercializes an industrial process that only meets a green chemistry requirement. At the end of the day, shareholders and companies have to make money. You have to balance the three drivers to truly create success.”