Anastassia Alexandrova

Last updated
Anastassia Alexandrova
Alma mater Saratov University
Utah State University
Scientific career
Institutions University of California, Los Angeles
Thesis Multiply aromatic clusters via ab initio genetic algorithm  (2005)
Website Alexandrova Lab

Anastassia N. Alexandrova is an American chemist who is a Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research considers the computational design of functional materials.

Contents

Early life and education

Alexandrova was the Winner of the Russian Regional Student Olympiad in Chemistry in 2000. [1] She attended the Saratov State University for her undergraduate studies, where she was awarded a scholarship from the Government of Russia for outstanding performance in science. She moved to the United States for her graduate studies at Utah State University, where she studied aromatic clusters using Ab initio genetic algorithms. [2] In particular, she developed the Gradient Embedded genetic Algorithm (GEGA) to identify the minima of atomic clusters. [2] [3] After earning her doctorate, Alexandrova moved to Yale University, where she joined the laboratory of William L. Jorgensen. She also worked in the laboratory of John C. Tully where she studied the photochemistry of DNA fragments. [4] [5]

Research and career

Alexandrova was appointed to the faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2010. [1] She develops multi-scale modeling methods to better understand novel functional materials. [1] The materials considered by Alexandrova included quantum dots, artificial metalloenzymes, heterogeneous catalysis and ultra hard alloys. [6] She makes use of various computational models, including density functional theory, molecular dynamics and ab initio quantum chemistry methods. Alexandrova spent 2016 as a Fulbright Program scholar at the École Normal Supérieure where she focused on computational catalysis. [7]

Awards and honors

Selected publications

Related Research Articles

Henry F. Schaefer III American theoretical chemist

Henry Frederick "Fritz" Schaefer III is a computational and theoretical chemist. He is one of the most highly cited chemists in the world, with a Thomson Reuters H-Index of 121 as of 2020. He is the Graham Perdue Professor of Chemistry and Director of the Center for Computational Chemistry at the University of Georgia.

Kendall Houk American chemist

Kendall Newcomb Houk is a Distinguished Research Professor in Organic Chemistry at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research group studies organic, organometallic, and biological reactions using the tools of computational chemistry. This work involves quantum mechanical calculations, often with density functional theory, and molecular dynamics, either quantum dynamics for small systems or force fields such as AMBER, for solution and protein simulations.

Marion Frederick Hawthorne was an inorganic chemist who made contributions to the chemistry of boron hydrides, especially their clusters.

Todd J. Martínez is a David Mulvane Ehrsam and Edward Curtis Franklin Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University and a Professor of Photon Science at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.

Carolyn R. Bertozzi American chemist (born 1966)

Carolyn Ruth Bertozzi is a prolific American chemist known for her wide-ranging work spanning both chemistry and biology. She coined the term "bioorthogonal chemistry" for chemical reactions compatible with living systems. Her recent efforts include synthesis of chemical tools to study cell surface sugars called glycans and how they impact diseases such as cancer, inflammation, and viral infections like COVID-19. At Stanford University, she holds the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professorship in the School of Humanities and Sciences. Bertozzi is also an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) and is the former Director of the Molecular Foundry, a nanoscience research center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She received the MacArthur "genius" award at age 33. In 2010, she was the first woman to receive the prestigious Lemelson-MIT Prize faculty award. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (2005), the Institute of Medicine (2011), and the National Academy of Inventors (2013). In 2014, it was announced that Bertozzi would lead ACS Central Science, the American Chemical Society's first peer-reviewed open access journal, which offers all content free to the public. As an open lesbian in academia and science, Bertozzi has been a role model for students and colleagues.

Anna Krylov Theoretical chemist

Anna I. Krylov is a Professor of Chemistry at the University of Southern California (USC), working in the field of theoretical and computational quantum chemistry. She is the inventor of the spin-flip method. Krylov is the president of Q-Chem, Inc. and an elected member of the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science and the Academia Europaea.

JoAnne Stubbe American chemist

JoAnne Stubbe is an American chemist best known for her work on ribonucleotide reductases, for which she was awarded the National Medal of Science in 2009. In 2017, she retired as a Professor of Chemistry and Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Angela K. Wilson is an American physical, theoretical, and computational chemist. She is currently the John A. Hannah Distinguished Professor of Chemistry in the department of chemistry of Michigan State University. At Michigan State University, she also serves as the Associate Dean for Strategic Initiatives in the College of Natural Sciences, and as Director of the MSU Center for Quantum Computing, Science, and Engineering (MSU-Q), a newly formed center at MSU, stemming from MSU's long history in quantum computing research.

TeraChem is a computational chemistry software program designed for CUDA-enabled Nvidia GPUs. The initial development started at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and was subsequently commercialized. It is currently distributed by PetaChem, LLC, located in Silicon Valley. As of 2020, the software package is still under active development.

Richard B. Kaner is an American synthetic inorganic chemist. He is a Distinguished Professor and the Dr. Myung Ki Hong Endowed Chair in Materials Innovation at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he holds a joint appointment in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and the Department of Material Science and Engineering. Kaner conducts research on conductive polymers (polyaniline), superhard materials and carbon compounds, such as fullerenes and graphene.

Sharon Hammes-Schiffer is a physical chemist who has contributed to theoretical and computational chemistry. She is currently a Sterling Professor of Chemistry at Yale University. She has served as senior editor and deputy editor of the Journal of Physical Chemistry and advisory editor for Theoretical Chemistry Accounts. As of 1 January 2015 she is editor-in-chief of Chemical Reviews.

Borophene

Borophene is a crystalline atomic monolayer of boron, i.e., it is a two-dimensional allotrope of boron and also known as boron sheet. First predicted by theory in the mid-1990s, different borophene structures were experimentally confirmed in 2015.

Emily A. Carter American chemist

Emily Ann Carter is the Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost at UCLA and a distinguished professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering. She served from 2016 to 2019 as Princeton's dean of engineering and applied science, before returning to UCLA as EVCP in September 2019. Carter developed her academic career at UCLA from 1988 to 2004, where she helped launch two institutes: the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics and the California NanoSystems Institute. Carter is a theorist and computational scientist whose work combines quantum mechanics, solid-state physics, and applied mathematics. 

Neil Garg American organic chemist

Neil K. Garg is currently a Distinguished professor of chemistry and holds the Kenneth N. Trueblood Endowed Chair at the University of California, Los Angeles. Garg's research is focused on the chemical synthesis of organic compounds, with an emphasis on the development of new strategies for the preparation of complex molecules possessing unique structural, biological, and physical properties. His group has made breakthroughs in catalysis and in the understanding and utilization of strained intermediates, such as arynes, cyclic alkynes, and cyclic allenes. His laboratory has completed the total syntheses of many natural products, including welwitindolinones, akuammilines, and tubingensin alkaloids.

Miguel García-Garibay

Miguel A. García-Garibay is a professor of chemistry and biochemistry and the dean of physical sciences at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). His research focuses on solid state organic chemistry, photochemistry and spectroscopy, artificial molecular machines, and mesoscale phenomena.

Kenneth M. Merz Jr. is an American biochemist and molecular biologist currently the Joseph Zichis Chair and a Distinguished University Professor at Michigan State University and Editor-in-Chief of American Chemical Society's Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling. A highly cited expert in his field, his research interests are in computational chemistry and biology and computer-aided drug design (CADD). His group has been involved in developing the widely using AMBER suite of programs for simulating chemical and biological systems and the QUICK program for quantum chemical calculations.

Triboracyclopropenyl

The triboracyclopropenyl fragment is a cyclic structural motif in boron chemistry, named for its geometric similarity to cyclopropene. In contrast to nonplanar borane clusters that exhibit higher coordination numbers at boron (e.g., through 3-center 2-electron bonds to bridging hydrides or cations), triboracyclopropenyl-type structures are rings of three boron atoms where substituents at each boron are also coplanar to the ring. Triboracyclopropenyl-containing compounds are extreme cases of inorganic aromaticity. They are the lightest and smallest cyclic structures known to display the bonding and magnetic properties that originate from fully delocalized electrons in orbitals of σ and π symmetry. Although three-membered rings of boron are frequently so highly strained as to be experimentally inaccessible, academic interest in their distinctive aromaticity and possible role as intermediates of borane pyrolysis motivated extensive computational studies by theoretical chemists. Beginning in the late 1980s with mass spectrometry work by Anderson et al. on all-boron clusters, experimental studies of triboracyclopropenyls were for decades exclusively limited to gas-phase investigations of the simplest rings (ions of B3). However, more recent work has stabilized the triboracyclopropenyl moiety via coordination to donor ligands or transition metals, dramatically expanding the scope of its chemistry.

Ohyun Kwon is a Korean-American chemist who is a Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research considers new methodologies for organic transformations and the development of chiral catalysts.

Alexander Boldyrev Russian-American scientist

Alexander I. Boldyrev is a Russian-American computational chemist and R. Gaurth Hansen Professor at Utah State University. Professor Boldyrev is known for his pioneering works on superhalogens, superalkalis, tetracoordinated planar carbon, inorganic double helix, boron and aluminum clusters, and chemical bonding theory, especially aromaticity/antiaromaticity in all-metal structures, and development of the Adaptive Natural Density Partitioning (AdNDP) method.

Kenichi Yokoyama is an enzymologist, chemical biologist, and natural product biochemist originally from Tokyo, Japan. He is an Associate Professor of Biochemistry at Duke University School of Medicine. In 2019, Yokoyama was awarded the Pfizer Award in Enzyme Chemistry from the American Chemical Society.

References

  1. 1 2 3 "Alexandrova, Anastassia N. | UCLA Chemistry and Biochemistry". www.chemistry.ucla.edu. Retrieved 2021-06-01.
  2. 1 2 "Anastassia Alexandrova". ion.chem.usu.edu. Retrieved 2021-06-01.
  3. "Boron Flat out". cen.acs.org. Archived from the original on 2020-08-10. Retrieved 2021-06-01.
  4. "Tully Group Home Page". ursula.chem.yale.edu. Retrieved 2021-06-01.
  5. Alexandrova, Anastassia N.; Tully, John C.; Granucci, Giovanni (2010-09-23). "Photochemistry of DNA Fragments via Semiclassical Nonadiabatic Dynamics". The Journal of Physical Chemistry B. 114 (37): 12116–12128. doi:10.1021/jp103322c. ISSN   1520-6106. PMID   20795696.
  6. "Alexandrova Lab". Archived from the original on 2011-11-05.
  7. 1 2 "Chemistry professor Anastassia Alexandrova is awarded Fulbright U.S. Scholar grant". UCLA. Retrieved 2021-06-01.
  8. "Anastassia Alexandrova wins NSF Early Career Development Award". UCLA. Retrieved 2021-06-01.
  9. "Anastassia Alexandrova awarded ACS 2016 Rising Star Award". UCLA. Retrieved 2021-06-01.
  10. "2018 Faculty Mentor Awards | UCLA Chemistry and Biochemistry". www.chemistry.ucla.edu. Retrieved 2021-05-31.
  11. "2018-2019 Distinguished Teaching Award for Senate Faculty | UCLA Chemistry and Biochemistry". www.chemistry.ucla.edu. Retrieved 2021-05-31.
  12. "ACS PHYS 2020 Early-Career Award in Theoretical Chemistry | UCLA Chemistry and Biochemistry". www.chemistry.ucla.edu. Retrieved 2021-05-31.