As part of the Chemical & Engineering News’ Nine for Ninety cover story, Professors Ken Houk and Anastassia Alexandrova were two of the eminent scientists asked to tell C&EN, “What do you think a chemical bond is in reality?”
The story featured on the special 90th anniversary issue of Chemical & Engineering News can be found here. In the article, Chemical & Engineering News asked the scientists to “consider how hey might describe a chemical bond to a nonchemist, to a nonscientist, or to a family member. They were also asked to consider how a chemical bond impacts our daily lives.”
Ken Houk & Anastassia Alexandrova
BIOGRAPHY OF KEN HOUK
K. N. Houk received A.B., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees at Harvard, working with R. B. Woodward as a graduate student in the area of experimental tests of orbital symmetry selection rules. He taught at Louisiana State University, the University of Pittsburgh, and UCLA since 1986. From 1988-1990, he was Director of the Chemistry Division of the National Science Foundation. He was Chairman of the UCLA Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry from 1991-1994, and became the Saul Winstein Chair in Organic Chemistry in 2009.
Professor Houk is an authority on theoretical and computational organic chemistry, beginning as an experimental organic chemist and now on the forefront of the application of computation and theory to understand and predict chemical and biological reactivity. He collaborates prodigiously with chemists all over the world and has published nearly 900 articles and given named lectures throughout the US.
Among his honors are the von Humboldt Foundation U.S. Senior Scientist Award, and Arthur C. Cope Scholar, James Flack Norris Award in Physical Organic Chemistry, Computers in Chemical and Pharmaceutical Sciences Award, the Tolman Medal, and the Arthur C. Cope Award, all from the American Chemical Society. He was awarded the Schrödinger Medal of the WATOC, the Faculty Research Lectureship at UCLA, the Bruylants Chair from the University of Louvain-la-Neuve in Belgium, the Dr. rer. nat. h. c. from the University of Essen, Germany, an Erskine Fellowship in New Zealand, a Lady Davis Fellow at the Technion in Haifa, Israel, a JSPS Fellow in Japan and this year won the Robert Robinson Award of the UK Royal Society of Chemistry. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Sciences, and the National Academy of Sciences. He has been named as Fellow of the AAAS, WATOC, ACS, and RSC.
Ken Houk has served on the boards of a variety of funding agencies and journals, including NIH Study Sections and the PRF Advisory Board. He was Chair of the Chemistry Section of the AAAS, and is now a Senior Editor of Accounts of Chemical Research. He was Director of the UCLA Chemistry-Biology Interface Training Program from 1999 until 2011, and is a member of the UCLA Molecular Biology Institute and California NanoSystems Institute.
BIOGRAPHY OF ANASTASSIA ALEXANDROVA
Anastassia Alexandrova obtained a B.S./M.S. Diploma in chemistry from Saratov University, Russia. Then, she briefly was a researcher at Vernadskii Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, Russia. She obtained her Ph.D. in theoretical physical chemistry from Utah State University with Professor Alexander Boldyrev. Her doctoral work was on novel small inorganic clusters and development of general theory of chemical bonding. She was a Postdoctoral Associate in computational biochemistry at Yale University, with Professor William Jorgensen, and then an American Cancer Society Postdoctoral Fellow in biophysics with Professor John Tully, also at Yale. She joined the UCLA Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and and became of a member of the California NanoSystems Institute in 2010.
Select honors from her young career are the 2013 Sloan Research Fellowship, 2011 DARPA Young Investigator Award, 2011 American Chemical Society YCC Leadership Development Award, 2005 Utah State University Robins Award: Graduate Research Assistant of the Year, and the 2005 Excellence Award of the Chemical Computing Group of the American Chemical Society.
