Prof. Roth joined the Faculty of Chemistry at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland, in 2011 after working for 21 years in Mobil/ExxonMobil Research and Engineering in New Jersey, USA, specializing in zeolite synthesis, from discovery to large scale use for industrial catalysis and sorption applications.
He was on the original team that discovered the ordered mesoporous materials (MCM-41 and M41S family) and was recipient of the D.W. Breck Award of the International Zeolite Association in 1994 for this discovery and also T. A. Edison Award in 2008 for the first commercialization of MCM-41. The corresponding two pioneering publications were cited over 23 thousand times and were, in 2017, the 4th and 3rd most cited Nature and JACS papers, respectively.
He is a graduate of the Technical University in Wroclaw, Poland (M.S.) and Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, USA (Ph.D.). In the 1980s he was a post-doc and staff member with Prof. F.A. Cotton at Texas A&M in College Station specializing in the synthesis of inorganic clusters, especially Nb and Ta with multiple metal-metal bonds .
He has been one of the pioneers of the layered zeolite area carrying out the first swelling and pillaring, contributing to the ADOR process and recently, proving soft-chemical exfoliation, which can be useful for hierarchical catalysts. He has proposed and developed some new fundamental concepts and practices.