Russell J. Boyd
Alexander McLeod Professor of Chemistry
BSc (UBC), PhD (McGill)
E-mail: russell.boyd@dal.ca
Phone: (902) 494-8883
Fax: (902) 494-1310
* Accepting Graduate Students
Research Interests: Computational and Theoretical Chemistry.
Contemporary theoretical methods are used and developed to study a broad range of problems in chemistry. Many projects involve collaboration with experimentalists and yield information which is unattainable by any other method. Such applications often lead to suggestions for new experiments and for refinements of the models upon which the theories are based. The strong local and international collaborative aspect of the research is reflected in the titles of recently published papers from the group.
Biography: Russell Boyd was born in Kelowna, the centre of British Columbia's wine-producing and fruit-growing Okanagan Valley.
He graduated in 1967 from the University of British Columbia with first-class honours in chemistry and the Lefevre Gold Medal. As one of the first recipients of a 1967 Science Scholarship (introduced in 1967 by the National Research Council of Canada to celebrate Canada's centennial), he went east to pursue his PhD in Theoretical Chemistry at McGill University. Upon receiving his PhD in 1971 he went to Oxford University as an NRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the Mathematical Institute. He returned to the University of British Columbia where he held a Killam Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of Chemistry from 1973 to 1975.
Dr. Boyd joined Dalhousie University as an Assistant Professor of Chemistry in 1975 and rose through the ranks to become a Professor in 1985. He has served as Chair of Chemistry from 1992 to 2005. He was named a Faculty of Science Killam Professor in 1997 and in 2001 became the seventh holder of the Alexander McLeod Chair of Chemistry. The McLeod Chair, one of the oldest named professorships in chemistry in Canada, was created in 1884 in accordance with a bequest from Alexander McLeod.
He received the 1983 APICS/Fraser Medal. He was the first and only chemist to receive this award which was awarded in the 1970s and 1980s to recognize outstanding research work carried out in the Atlantic Provinces by a young scientist or engineer. Dr. Boyd is a Fellow of the Chemical Institute of Canada, a member of the College of Reviewers of the Canada Research Chairs, and a member of the Scientific Board of the World Association of Theoretical and Computational Chemistry. He has served on several committees of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and on many boards, including the Canadian Society for Chemistry, the Canadian Journal of Chemistry, and the Dalhousie University Foundation.
Dr. Boyd has published more than 220 peer-reviewed papers in computational and theoretical chemistry. Citations of his papers place him in the top 0.4 per cent of the world's chemists. He is especially proud of the number of excellent young scientists who received a significant part of their training in his group. Five of his former PhD students and four of his former postdoctoral fellows hold tenure-track or tenured positions in Canadian universities. A similar number hold comparable positions in universities in the U.S. and Europe.
In the early part of his career, Dr. Boyd earned an international reputation for his research in theoretical chemistry with an emphasis on the analysis of electron correlation and electron density distributions. More recently, he and his students have gained much recognition for their applications of contemporary computational methods to the study of biological systems. This is a rapidly developing field of research because there is often little information on the identity of short-lived biomolecules and even less on the mechanisms by which they affect the physiology of living systems. Theoretical methods are now a viable partner to experiment in chemical research.
