Anna Krylov is a Professor of Chemistry at the University of Southern California working in the area of theoretical and computational quantum chemistry. Born in Donetsk, Ukraine (May 6, 1967), Anna Krylov received her M.Sc. (with honors) in Chemistry from Moscow State University and later her Ph.D. from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, working under the supervision of Professor Robert Benny Gerber. Her Ph.D. research at the Fritz Haber Center was focused on molecular dynamics in rare gas clusters and matrices. Upon completing her Ph.D. in 1996 (summa cum laude), she joined the group of Prof. Martin Head-Gordon at the University of California, Berkeley as a postdoctoral research associate, where she first became involved with electronic structure method development. In 1998, she joined Department of Chemistry at USC.
Currently, Prof. Krylov leads a research group focused on theoretical modeling of open shell and electronically excited species. She is the head of the Center for Computational Studies of Electronic Structure and Spectroscopy of Open-Shell and Electronically Excited Species, iOpenShell, supported by the National Science Foundation (2005–2011) and the University of Southern California. She is developing robust black-box methods aiming to describe complicated multi-configurational wave functions in a single-reference formalism, such as coupled-cluster and equation-of-motion (or linear response) approaches. She has developed the spin-flip approach, which extends coupled-cluster and density functional methods to diradicals, triradicals, and bond-breaking. Using computational chemistry tools, and in collaboration with numerous experimental groups, Krylov is also investigating the role that radicals and electronically excited species play in such diverse areas as combustion, gas- and condensed-phase chemistry, solar energy applications, bioimaging, and ionization-induced processes in biology. She has co-authored more than 120 publications and has delivered more than 130 invited lectures.
Anna Krylov's research has received worldwide recognition, in particular for her invention of the spin-flip method. She has received several prizes, including the WATOC (World Association of Theoretical and Computational Chemists) 2007 Dirac Medal for her "outstanding research on new methods in electronic structure theory for the description of bond-breaking, in particular the spin-flip method," and the Agnes Fay Morgan Research Award, given by Iota Sigma Pi National Honor Society annually for outstanding research achievements to a woman chemist or biochemist not over 40 years of age. In 2011, she was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society; and she won a Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for developing robust electronic structure methods for open-shell and electronically excited species, and creative use of ab initio theory to understand the chemistry of bimolecules, reaction intermediates, and photoinduced processes. She also received the 2012 Theoretical Chemistry Award from the Physical Chemistry Division of the American Chemical Society.
As part of the activities of iOpenShell, Krylov has contributed to science education and outreach by establishing an electronic structure forum and by developing educational materials and films to help popularize science. The two iOpenShell films, “Shine A Light” and “Laser”, have been viewed more than 55,000 times on YouTube since September 2009.
Krylov has served on the editorial boards of several peer-review journals, including Annual Reviews of Physical Chemistry, Journal of Chemical Physics, Journal of Physical Chemistry, Chemical Physics Letters, and International Journal of Quantum Chemistry. She has organized several symposia and is a Board member of WATOC and ISTCP. Anna is also a Board member of Q-Chem Inc, developer of Q-Chem, one of the world's leading ab initio quantum chemistry programs.
In addition to her permanent appointment at USC, Prof. Krylov has served as a visiting professor at Caltech, University of Minnesota (Minneapolis), University of Colorado (JILA), and Heidelberg University.
Prof. Krylov lives in Southern California and is a big fan of outdoor sports, in particular, rock climbing.