ChE Ph.D. Student SeungBo Hong Wins Kokes Award from North American Catalysis Society
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Ph.D. Candidate SeungBo Hong of the UMass Amherst Chemical Engineering (ChE) Department has received a Richard J. Kokes Travel Award from the North American Catalysis Society (NACS). The Kokes award program encourages student participation in the biennial meetings of the NACS. In this case, it funded Hong’s attendance at the 29th NACS Meeting (NAM29) in Atlanta, Georgia, in June. Beyond attendance at the meeting, the award enabled Hong to present his research related to how “Data Science Shows That Entropy Correlates with Accelerated Zeolite Crystallization in Monte Carlo Simulation” at NAM29.
According to the NAM29 website, it was the premier scientific event in the field of catalysis research and development in 2025 and featured technological challenges, breakthrough discoveries, and state-of-the-art academic and industrial research.
Hong, who does his research in the lab of Professor Scott Auerbach of the UMass Amherst Chemistry Department and an adjunct in the ChE department, also received a PPG Foundation Fellowship Award for 2024-25. In addition to that, his work has been published in the Journal of Chemical Physics: https://pubs.aip.org/aip/jcp/article-abstract/161/23/234708/3326569/Data-science-shows-that-entropy-correlates-with.
The background of the research that Hong presented at NAM 29 is that zeolites represent a group of microporous, crystalline minerals formed from aluminosilicate and commonly utilized as commercial adsorbents and catalysts. Zeolites, with their intricate nanoporous structures, are also vital materials for diverse applications spanning catalysis, separations, and storage. The increasing demand for tailormade zeolites, particularly for sustainability applications such as biofuel production and carbon capture, has intensified research into controlling zeolite formation.
“However,” as Hong says, “a fundamental understanding of pathways and rates of zeolite crystallization at the atomic level still needs to be improved.”
Hong then explains that “Our group recently conducted a combined computational and experimental study to address this challenge, employing Monte Carlo simulations and zeolite-synthesis experiments.”
According to the website Investopedia, “A Monte Carlo simulation is a way to model the probability of different outcomes in a process that cannot easily be predicted due to the intervention of random variables.”
As Hong says, “Our findings revealed that adding tetramethylammonium as a secondary organic structure-directing agent significantly accelerates the formation of an all-silica Linde Type A zeolite compared to using only one organic structure-directing agent.”
As Hong summarizes the research, “The present study implemented data-science methods to investigate the Monte Carlo structural datasets and to shed light on the origin of the speedup by including an additional organic structure-directing agent and concluding that entropy plays a critical role.”
In addition to Hong, ChE Ph.D. students Muhammad Shah and Dipti Bhave, also won Kokes Travel Awards. ChE Ph.D. candidate R. Morgan Whitfield III received an honorable mention. (August 2025)