ENMIX PAPER AWARD 2026
The ENMIX paper award is awarded to the best scientific publication focusing on nanoporous materials and authored by a PhD student or postdoc from one or more ENMIX partner laboratories.
For the 2026 award, seven nominations were recieved and evaluated by the 10th ENMIX workshop Scientific commitee in Valencia, Spain. These members were:
- P. Cool (Univ. Antwerp)
- P. Oña-Burgos (ITQ)
- E. Iliopoulou (CPERI/CERTH)
- C. Martínez (ITQ)
- N. Novak Tušar (NIC)
- F. Pereira (Univ. Porto)
- E. Klemm (Univ. Stuttgart)
The 2026 award was presented to Pau Ferri-Vicedo (ITQ), a PhD student in the group of Dr. Mercedes Boronat for his paper entitled: High-throughput transition-state searches in zeolite nanopores, published in Nature Computational Science. Congratulations are extended to the co-authors Dr. Alexander J. Hoffman, Dr. Avni Singhal, and Prof. Rafael Gómez-Bombarelli from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
on manual structural manipulation. Here we introduce pore transition-state finder (PoTS), an automated pipeline for locating transition states (TS) in zeolites. PoTS identifies gas-phase TSs via density functional theory, docks them near active sites in zeolite pores and uses their reaction modes to seed condensed-phase TS searches with the dimer method. This automation reduces user intervention, improves success rates and bypasses the need for long path-following calculations. We apply PoTS to a density functional theory-level dataset of zeolite-confined TSs, finding good experimental agreement in both cases. Last, we propose a path to address the limitations we observe regarding unsuccessful TS searches and insufficient theory in other reactions, such as alkene cracking.