Alexandra Velian (she/her)

Alexandra began her independent career at the University of Washington in 2017. A central goal in her group is to create next-generation catalysts geared to turn green-house gases like methane and carbon dioxide into value added products. Her approach is to use molecular strategies to synthesize single-site catalysts that harness metal-support interactions, and shine light on processes that govern the substrate/active sites/support interactions.

Alexandra’s scientific and academic contributions have been recognized with several awards and distinctions, including the Sloan Fellowship (2024), the Inorganic Chemistry Lectureship Award (2023), the Camille Dreyfus Teacher Scholar Award (2023), the Marion Milligan Mason AAAS Award (2023), the C&EN Talented 12 distinction (2022), a Cottrell Scholar Fellowship (2020), the NSF Career Award (2019), the Young Investigator Award – ACS Division of Inorganic Chemistry (2016) and the Alan Davison Prize for the Best Thesis in Inorganic Chemistry at MIT (2015). Most recently, Alexandra Velian was elected chair for the ACS Division of Inorganic Chemistry, Organometallic Subdivision (2024), and is also serving on the Editorial Advisory Board for JACS and Inorganic Chemistry (2024), as well as the Early Career Advisory Board for Inorganic Chemistry Frontiers (2024).

Alexandra completed her undergraduate studies in chemistry at Caltech, where she conducted research primarily with Professor Theodor Agapie. As the first member of his group, she developed the synthesis of low-valent mono- and bimetallic complexes supported by a terphenyl diphosphine framework. She received her Ph.D. under the direction of Professor Christopher C. Cummins at MIT, where she developed the synthesis of anthracene and niobium-supported precursors to reactive phosphorus fragments and studied their behavior using chemical, spectroscopic, and computational methods. Notably, this work gave rise to the synthesis of the 6π all-inorganic aromatic anion heterocycle P2N3−, produced in the “click” reaction of P2 with the azide ion. Following her PhD, Alexandra was a Materials Research Science & Engineering Center postdoctoral fellow with Professor Colin Nuckolls at Columbia University, where she worked on creating well-defined functional nanostructures by linking atomically precise metal chalcogenide clusters.