Javier Pérez-Ramírez FRSC (born 1974) is a Spanish Chemical Engineer who is a tenured professor at the Institute for Chemical and Bioengineering at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich. He studied Chemical Engineering at the University of Alicante, and later obtained his PhD cum laude at TU Delft (2002). He worked for Norsk Hydro and Yara International and returned to academia as a ICREA research professor at the Institute of Chemical Research of Catalonia, related to the Rovira i Virgili University (2005-2009).
Pérez-Ramírez's central research focuses on the fundamental design and technical development of new heterogeneous catalysts and reactor engineering concepts, favoring the more efficient and sustainable manufacturing within the chemical industry, such as his development of novel catalysts for the gas-phase oxidation of hydrogen chloride (Deacon process) and his groundbreaking work in the rational design of hierarchical zeolites.
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry in 2013 and a scientific member of the advisory board of the Max-Planck Institute for Coal Research in 2015. He is the Swiss representative of the European Federation of Catalysis Societies.
He is associate editor of Catalysis Science & Technology, and sits on the editorial board of Advanced Functional Materials, Applied Catalysis B: Environmental, ACS Catalysis, and Catalysis Communications.
Pérez-Ramírez's work of nearly 400 articles and 13 patents has been recognized by several major prizes, including the Beilby Medal and Prize (2014), EFCATS Young Researcher Award (2013), DECHEMA Otto Roelen Medal (2012), the Andrew Main lectureship (2013), the UOP-Honeywell Invitational Lectureship (2012), and the KNCV Prijs voor Katalyse (2003).