Simon R. Bare

Simon received his PhD from the University of Liverpool in 1982, and then held postdoctoral appointments at Cornell University (Prof. Wilson Ho) and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Prof. Gabor Somorjai). In 1986 he moved to industrial R&D, and took a positon with The Dow Chemical Company in Midland, MI. He was initially responsible for surface characterization of catalysts, and then expanded into methods applicable to studying catalysts in-situ. It was during his time at Dow that he had his first experience of using synchrotrons for catalyst characterization. In 1996 he moved to UOP LLC, a Honeywell Company, in Des Plaines, IL where he spent the next 19 years, and built up a reputation for in-situ and operando characterization of catalysts using primarily x-ray absorption spectroscopy. After spending so much of his time at synchrotrons, he decided he should spend more of his time there, so took a position as a Distinguished Scientist at SSRL at SLAC National Accelerator Lab in 2016. He is currently leading an effort there called, Co-ACCESS (Consortium for Operando and Advanced Catalyst Characterization via Electronic Spectroscopy and Structure).