Anastassia Alexandrova appointed as the inaugural Charles W. Clifford Jr. Chair in Chemistry & Biochemistry

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Prof. Anastassia Alexandrova

The UCLA Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry has appointed Professor Anastassia Alexandrova as the inaugural Charles W. Clifford Jr. Chair in Chemistry & Biochemistry, effective retroactively to July 1, 2024.

Charles W. Clifford Jr.
Charles W. Clifford Jr.

In 2022, UCLA alumnus Charles W. Clifford Jr. (’49) made a generous gift to the UCLA Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry. The department and the Division of Physical Sciences were able to match the gift and establish the Charles W. Clifford Jr. Chair in Chemistry & Biochemistry. The Chair is designed to support an outstanding faculty member within the Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry who excels in research, teaching and service. Charles Clifford Jr. was born in Akron, Ohio, in 1923 and graduated from UCLA in 1949. He passed away in 2022.

A professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, as well as in Materials Science and Engineering, Alexandrova joined the UCLA faculty in 2010. She earned her B.S./M.S. degree with highest honors from Saratov State University (Russia) in 2000, followed by a Ph.D. in Theoretical Physical Chemistry from Utah State University in 2005. Afterward, she completed her postdoctoral training as a Postdoctoral Associate and later as an American Cancer Society Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University. 

The research in Alexandrova laboratory is in theory and computation and spans several fields, in each of which they made seminal contributions. In heterogeneous catalysis, they introduced a new paradigm where the catalytic interface is modeled as a dynamic statistical ensemble of many states, challenging the notion of a stationary and passive state of the catalyst in the reaction dynamics. In enzymology, they tackle fundamental phenomena related to the role of the protein scaffold in catalysis, and in particular the dynamic electric fields that these scaffolds impose on the active site. Prominently, since 2022, Alexandrova serves as a Director of the NSF Center for Chemical Innovation, focusing on the design of novel molecular qubits and their assemblies for the field of quantum information science.  

Alexandrova’s exceptional research and teaching have earned her numerous prestigious awards. In 2024, she received the Quantum Bio-Inorganic Chemistry (QBIC) Prize for her groundbreaking research on the role of electrostatics in enzymatic catalysis. She was also honored with the DOE Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) Award in 2024, 2022, and 2020. In the same year, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry.

In 2023, Alexandrova was awarded the UCLA Gold Shield Faculty Prize for academic excellence and the Brown Investigator Award from the Brown Science Foundation. In 2022, she received the Chemical Science Reviewer Highlight Award and the Utah State University Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry Alumni Achievement Award. Additionally, in 2021, she was awarded the Max Planck-Humboldt Medal, a prestigious joint honor from the Max Planck Society and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany. In 2020, she also received the ACS PHYS Early Career Award.  In addition, Alexandrova received a UCLA Undergraduate Research Mentorship Award in 2018, and a 2019 Distinguished Teaching Award (the highest honor for teaching given in UCLA).

Beyond her research and teaching, Alexandrova serves as a Senior Editor of the Journal of Physical Chemistry as well as a reviewing editor of the Science magazine, and has organized many conferences and symposia, including at both ACS and American Physical Society meetings. She was the chair of the Theory subdivision of the PHYS Division of the ACS, and in that role established the ACS graduate student award in theoretical chemistry. Her service and leadership within the Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry include serving as Vice Chair for Undergraduate Education (2019-22) and Liaison for the Physical Chemistry Division (2024 to present).

Penny Jennings, UCLA Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry, penny@chem.ucla.edu.