USU Chemist Alexander Boldyrev Named AAAS Fellow

Utah State University chemistry professor Alexander Boldyrev has been named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, one of the nation’s top scientific honors. One of 564 honorees selected nationwide for the 2021 class of AAAS Fellows, Boldyrev will be formally recognized during the association’s virtual annual meeting Feb. 17-20.

“Being named an AAAS Fellow is a distinct honor reserved for our country’s top scientists,” says USU College of Science Interim Dean Michelle Baker. “We are delighted Dr. Boldyrev has received this well-deserved recognition for his outstanding contributions to chemistry.”

Boldyrev, who was named USU’s inaugural R. Gaurth Hansen Professor in 2020, is known globally for his pioneering breakthroughs in building a theoretical framework for understanding the bonding properties of inorganic compounds. His efforts have enabled fellow chemists to predict a number of entirely new classes of species.

“I am very humbled by this recognition,” says Boldyrev, who joined USU’s Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry in 1999 and received the D. Wynne Thorne Career Research Award, the university’s highest research honor, in 2009.

A prolific research writer and longstanding recipient of National Science Foundation support, Boldyrev has an impressive h-index (a measurement of research impact) of 80. His work has been cited in more than 22,000 papers.

Throughout his career, Boldyrev has discovered a wide variety of new classes of chemical species, including all-metal aromatic clusters, inorganic helixes, superhalogens and superalkalis, planar boron clusters and boron wheels binding transition-metal atoms with extreme coordination numbers of more than 10. His newest research focus is artificial intelligence, which he and his students employ in the search for the most stable structures of new molecules and for the computational design of new materials.

In October 2021, Boldyrev was honored with a “festschrift,” a lifetime tribute, by The Journal of Physical Chemistry A. The rare honor by the premier scientific journal recognized the USU scholar’s career of high achievements with a special issue featuring nearly 80 papers authored by researchers from around the world, including a number of Boldyrev’s former students.

In addition to research accolades, Boldyrev is well known for his mentorship of students and is quick to note the achievements of his mentees, which include five scholars named USU Robins Award Graduate Student Researchers of the Year, as well as a recent graduate who received an Oppenheimer Postdoctoral Fellowship. Boldyrev was named Utah State’s Outstanding Graduate Mentor of the Year in 2017.

A native of Novokuznetsk, Siberia, Boldyrev’s interest in chemistry was fueled by an elementary science teacher’s presentation, along with the nascent space race between the former Soviet Union and the United States. The young science enthusiast idolized Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin and, as a teen, was selected for a high school for gifted STEM students. Boldyrev completed studies at Novosibirsk University and earned doctorates from the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences’ Institute of New Chemical Problems and the Institute of Chemical Physics.

Employed with the Soviet Academy of Sciences for nearly 20 years, Boldyrev was invited to Germany on an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Fellowship and subsequently accepted a visiting professorship at the University of Utah before joining Utah State.

According to its website, the AAAS is the world’s largest general scientific society. The association initiated the Fellow designation in 1874.