Anna Krylov

In 2022, she received the USC Associates Award for Creativity in Research and Scholarship, the highest scholarly award granted by the University. That same year, she received the inaugural Communicator of the Year Award, Science and Mathematics, from the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences. The award recognized her efforts to inform the scientific community and the general public through writings and speaking engagements of "the growing influence of politics and moral trends within STEM fields."

Using the tools of computational chemistry, and in collaboration with numerous experimental laboratories, Krylov also investigates the role that radicals and electronically excited species play in such diverse areas as combustion, gas- and condensed-phase chemistry, astrochemistry, solar energy, quantum information storage, bioimaging, and light-induced biological processes. She has co-authored more than 270 publications and has delivered more than 300 invited lectures, including the 2012 Löwdin Lecture at Uppsala University Sweden, the 2013 Coulson Lecture at the University of Georgia, and the 2018 Davison Lecture at the University of North Texas.

Krylov has developed educational materials (computational labs and tutorials) aiming to increase quantum chemistry literacy among chemists. She has also developed films to help popularize science. The two iOpenShell films, Shine a Light and Laser, have been viewed more than 66,000 times on YouTube since September 2009. In 2015, Krylov delivered a public lecture in the Telluride Science Research Center Town Talk series entitled “Molecules and Light: The Story of Life, Death, and our Quest for Knowledge”.

Krylov has received worldwide recognition, in particular for her invention of the spin-flip method. She received the 2007 WATOC (World Association of Theoretical and Computational Chemists) 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 for outstanding research achievements to a woman chemist or biochemist under 40 years of age. She is the recipient of 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 biomolecules, reaction intermediates, and photoinduced processes; and the recipient of the 2012 Theoretical Chemistry Award from the Physical Chemistry Division of the American Chemical Society. In addition, she has received the USC Melon Mentoring Award, the Hanna Reisler Mentoring Award from the WiSE program, the USC Phi Kappa Phi Faculty Recognition Award, and the INSIGHT Into Diversity Inspiring Women in STEM Award. In 2017, Krylov was recognized with the Mildred Dresselhaus Award from the Center for Ultrafast Imaging at DESY in Hamburg, Germany. In 2018, she was awarded a Simons Fellowship in Theoretical Physics from the Simons Foundation. In 2019 she received the American Physical Association's prestigious Earle K. Plyler Prize for Molecular Spectroscopy & Dynamics for her:

Upon completing her Ph.D. in 1996, she joined the group of Prof. Martin Head-Gordon at the University of California, Berkeley, as a postdoctoral research associate, where she became involved with electronic structure method development. In 1998, she joined the Department of Chemistry at USC.

Born in Donetsk, Ukraine (May 6, 1967), Krylov received her M.Sc. (with honors) in Chemistry from Moscow State University in 1990 and her Ph.D. (summa cum laude) from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem working under the supervision of Professor Robert Benny Gerber. Her Ph.D. research at the Fritz Haber Center focused on molecular dynamics in rare gas clusters and matrices.