Two women physical chemistry faculty featured in special JPC issue honoring Marie Curie

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Professors Anastassia Alexandrova & Sarah Tolbert featured in The Journal of Physical Chemistry issue honoring Marie Curie’s 150th birthday.

The Special Issue, published on November 2, 2017, highlights the science and publications by 66 women physical chemists who have published highly sighted papers in JPC and an editorial with information about the history of papers authored by women, beginning with renowed physicist and chemist Nobel Laureate Professor Marie Curie, and it also identifies women who have contributed to JPC as editors, as EAB members, who have received awards from JPC, and who have been recognized in Special Issues.

Alexandrova032515Professor Anastassia Alexandrova is an associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry at UCLA. She earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees 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 Prof. Alexander Boldyrev. 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 Prof. John Tully, also at Yale. She joined the UCLA faculty in 2010. The focus of her laboratory is computational and theoretical design and multi-scale description of new materials.

Tolbert Sarah Small 2017Professor Sarah Tolbert holds faculty appointments in chemistry and biochemistry and in the UCLA Department of Materials Science and Engineering. She received her bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Yale University. She then received her Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, studying the structure, stability, and electronic properties of nanometer sized clusters with Prof. A. Paul Alivisatos. Tolbert was a Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of California, Santa Barbara, researching the synthesis, characterization, and physical and structural properties of new inorganic/organic composite and mesoporous materials with Prof. Galen D. Stucky.  She joined the UCLA faculty in 1997. Tolbert’s research focuses on controlling nanometer-scale architecture in solution-processed nanomaterials to generate unique optical, electronic, magnetic, structural, and electrochemical properties. Her group specifically focuses on electrochemical energy storage, solar energy harvesting, electrocatalysis, nanomagnetics, and new ultra-hard materials. She also leads a program aimed at bringing nano-concepts to schools throughout the greater Los Angeles area.