Paul B. Weisz

From 1974 to 1976 he was a visiting professor at Princeton University. From 1983 he was a distinguished professor of chemical and bio-engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. From 1993 he was an adjunct professor in chemical engineering at Pennsylvania State University. In this period he applied chemical and physical principles to biomedical research, including work with Madeleine M. Joullié on the synthesis of a molecule equivalent to heparin which avoided the dangerous side-effects of the natural molecule.

The company permitted him a sabbatical period from 1964 to 1966 at ETH Zurich, where he earned a doctorate setting the foundation for some of the fundamental laws of diffusion in dyeing.

In 1946 he joined Mobil as a Research Assistant, turning his attention to diffusion and catalysis, eventually rising to become Manager of the Central Research Laboratory, and staying there until his retirement in 1984. It was there that he carried out the work which made him most famous, the development of shape-selective catalysts which revolutionized many petroleum refining and chemical processes. A 1960 paper, "Intracrystalline and Molecular-Shape-Selective Catalysis by Zeolite Salts", coauthored with Vince Frilette, a Mobil colleague, became the foundation of shape-selective catalysis (which accelerated certain chemical reactions, but only for molecules of particular shape) and one of his most widely cited papers. Processes based on this and subsequent work were first commercialized in the early 1960s.

Weisz studied physics at the Technical University of Berlin and then at Alabama Polytechnic Institute where he received a B.S. degree in 1940. He took a sabbatical from work and gained a doctorate at ETH Zurich in 1966.

Paul Burgan Weisz (July 2, 1919–September 25, 2012) was a Czechoslovak-born American chemist, noted for his work on solid catalysts which had a major impact on petroleum refining.

Weisz was born July 2, 1919 in Plzeň, Czechoslovakia, the son of Alexander and Amalia Weisz: they moved to Berlin and finally emigrated to the United States in 1939. He married, and was survived by his wife, Rhoda, and his son, Randy and daughter, Ingrid. He died September 25, 2012 in State College, Pennsylvania.