The oxidative coupling of 4-methylpyridine to 4,4'-dimethyl-2,2'-bipyridine over palladium oxide is a simple, environmentally friendly, one-step process to produce bipyridines, which are commonly used with transition metal ions to form complexes with interesting properties. However, the reaction is slow and the palladium catalyst deactivates during reaction, which means that catalyst improvements are needed for large-scale production of more economically viable bipyridine products. In this study, a number of metal oxides were investigated as catalyst supports and compared to the best performing catalysts to date, i.e. Pd/C and Pd/n-Al2O3(+). Catalysts supported on several nanoparticle oxides with varying properties as well as some conventional supports were prepared and characterized in an attempt to determine properties that lead to high catalytic activities in the oxidative coupling of 4-methylpyridine. it was found that two general categories of active catalysts can be prepared; (1) palladium supported on very high surface area materials, such as Pd/n-Al2O3(+) and Pd/MgO, and (2) palladium supported on metal oxides known to induce strong palladium-support interactions, e.g. Pd/ZrO2, Pd/(n-ZrO2 + n-CeO2) and Pd/n-ZnO. While there is no simple correlation between the palladium surface area and the catalytic activity, higher palladium dispersions generally gave higher yields compared to lower dispersion catalysts. The results indicate that the reaction is structure sensitive, i.e. not all the palladium on the surface is equivalent and some palladium species are more active than others. The acidic and basic properties of the supports were determined via chemisorption of ammonia and carbon dioxide, respectively. The data indicate that there is no correlation between the acidic or basic sites of the supports and the palladium dispersion or the catalytic activity, although highly acidic or highly basic supports should be avoided as they resulted in lower dispersions than expected from their corresponding surface areas. In terms of economic viability the porous TiO2 support was determined to be the most competitive with the nanoparticle alumina Support as it results in a catalyst with comparable yields and is less expensive compared with nanoparticle alumina. The palladium supported on nanoparticle ZrO2 and MgO are also promising catalysts. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.