Manos Mavrikakis is the Ernest Micek Distinguished Chair, the James A. Dumesic Professor, and the Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He received a Diploma in Chemical Engineering from NTUA in Greece, and a PhD in Chemical Engineering & Scientific Computing from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Following postdocs at the University of Delaware and the Technical University of Denmark, he joined the faculty of Chemical Engineering at UW-Madison in 1999. His main research interests include the elucidation of detailed reaction mechanisms for thermal heterogeneously catalyzed and electrocatalyzed reactions and the identification of improved catalytic materials from first-principles-based microkinetic modeling. Bridging the pressure gap between UHV experiments and atmospheric/higher pressure experiments in catalysis has been at the heart of his work.
Mavrikakis has been elected Fellow of APS (2013), AAAS (2014), and AVS (2016). He served as his Department Chair (2015-2018) and was a Visiting Miller Research Professor at UC Berkeley – Chemistry in 2019. He received the 2009 Paul H. Emmett award from the North American Catalysis Society, the 2014 R. H. Wilhelm award from AIChE, the 2019 Gabor A. Somorjai award from ACS, and the 2021 Robert Burwell Lectureship from the North American Catalysis Society. He served as editor-in-chief of Surface Science between 2012 and 2020.