Professor Anastassia Alexandrova’s 2017 Viewpoint article is selected for ACS Catalysis Virtual Issue: “Blurring the Lines Between Catalysis Subdisciplines”.
The ACS Catalysis special Virtual Issue features selected examples of papers that cut across boundaries between traditional catalysis subdisciplines as part of the journal’s celebration of its 10th anniversary in 2020 and its 10th volume of publication.
Alexandrova’s former graduate student Dr. Huanchen Zhai (Ph.D. ’19), now a postdoctoral researcher at the California Institute of Technology, was first author of the featured article, titled “Fluxionality of Catalytic Clusters: When It Matters and How to Address It”, published on January 27, 2017.
According to the journal, the 25 papers included in the collection are but a small fraction of the papers that blur the lines between traditional catalysis communities, with many more examples published over the 10 volumes of ACS Catalysis to date.
Figure 1. Conditions of catalysis (A) do not imply a single rigid cluster isomer facilitating a single catalytic event in vacuum (B), but instead, realistic coverage, temperature T, pressure p, access to many cluster isomers (% in C indicating probabilities for occurrences), and fluxionality all have an influence on catalyst activity. Thus, a statistical ensemble representation of the catalyst isomers under catalytic thermal conditions is necessary.
ACS Catal. 2017, 7, 3, 1905-1911
A professor of chemistry and biochemistry and Vice Chair for Undergraduate Education, Alexandrova’s laboratory focuses on computational and theoretical design and multi-scale description of new materials. Her recent awards and honors include the ACS PHYS 2020 Early-Career Award in Theoretical Chemistry, the 2019 UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award and the 2018 UCLA Undergraduate Research Faculty Mentor Award. To learn more about Alexandrova’s research, visit her group’s website.
Penny Jennings, UCLA Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry, penny@chem.ucla.edu.
