Petroleum provides more than fuel in everyday life: crude oil is the basis for virtually all plastics that make bottles, bags, credit cards, sport clothing, carpet and a host of other products.
"I often tell people that petroleum is too valuable a material just to burn," said Jones, a chemistry professor at the University of Rochester. The trick is chemically transforming the stable chains of hydrocarbons of petroleum into reactive starting materials for plastics and other products.
The current process breaks up the oil's long hydrocarbons into two-carbon pieces, then stitches them back together in various ways to form plastics. Jones wants to cut out the inefficient middle step by activating hydrocarbons directly with small, extremely reactive metals.
"What we study is how individual metal atoms interact with hydrocarbons -- how they bind, how they break bonds and what happens once the bonds are broken," he said. In fact, he is a pioneer in the field, a member of a small circle that showed the chemical world 20 years ago that hydrocarbon activation was not as fanciful as many researchers thought.
He and his research team now focus on attaching groups of atoms to those of rhodium, nickel, platinum or other metals. With those groups he can design catalysts, chemistry's construction workers, that fine-tune the chemical interaction between metals and hydrocarbons.
Jones said his interest in science dates back to junior high school. "I liked the idea even then of being able to do an experiment, something you could see, that told you about something you couldn't see," he explained.
Jones received his undergraduate degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1975 and his Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology in 1979. He is a member of the ACS division of inorganic chemistry.
The ACS Award in Organometallic Chemistry is sponsored by the Dow Chemical Co. Foundation.