Phoenix S&T, Inc. is pleased to announce that Professor Sylvia T. Ceyer and Dr. George W. Parshall have joined our Science Advisory Board. They advise Phoenix S&T on scientific and technological issues related to the company’s product development and applications.

Professor Ceyer is the J. C. Sheehan Professor of Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She is a physical chemist with research interests in the area of molecule-surface reaction dynamics as related to heterogeneous catalysis. She has uncovered sources of the apparent lack of surface reactivity under ultrahigh vacuum conditions and then used that knowledge to effect high pressure heterogeneous catalytic reactions (using supersonic molecular beams and time-of-flight mass spectrometry) in an ultrahigh vacuum environment where microscopic reaction steps can be discerned. Specifically she has uncovered new mechanisms for dissociative chemisorption and desorption such as atom abstraction, collision induced activation, absorption and desorption, provided new methods for adsorbate synthesis, demonstrated the use of electron spectroscopy as a vibrational spectroscopy sensitive to bulk species, discovered the role of bulk hydrogen in hydrogenation reactions, identified and clarified the site conversion process, and extended the understanding of molecular precursors. She received her B.A. degree from Hope College, and her Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley.

Professor Ceyer is a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences and chair of its chemistry section, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a fellow of the American Physical Society. She has been awarded the Hope College Distinguished Alumni Award, the Edgerton Prize, the American Association of University Women's Young Scholar Award and has been the holder of a Sloan Fellowship and several named lectureships including the Langmuir Lecturer of the American Chemical Society and a Welch Foundation Lectureship. Ceyer has received the Baker Award for undergraduate teaching, the School of Science Teaching Prize and the Nobel Laureate Signature Award for Graduate Education from the American Chemical Society. In 1998, she was named a MacVicar teaching fellow at MIT.

Dr. George W. Parshall was Director - Chemical Science in the Central Research & Development Department of the DuPont Company from 1979 until his retirement at the end of 1992. Since retirement, he has consulted for DuPont and Westinghouse and has been involved in many advisory activities through the National Research Council. He is a recognized authority on industrial catalysis and on chemical warfare agents.

He received his B.S. in chemistry from the University of Minnesota in 1951 and his Ph.D. in organic chemistry from the University of Illinois in 1954. He has published a book, Homogeneous Catalysis, and numerous publications describing the applications of soluble catalysts in industry and in the synthesis laboratory. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received two major American Chemical Society Awards - the ACS Award in Inorganic Chemistry and the Barnes Award for Leadership in Chemical Research Management.