Rate My Professor Anatoliy Volkov

Anatoliy Volkov is a Professor in the Department of Chemistry at Middle Tennessee State University. He earned a B.S. and an M.S. in Geology, specializing in Geochemistry, Mineralogy, and Crystallography, from St. Petersburg State University in Russia, followed by a Ph.D. in Physical and Computational Chemistry from the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. Volkov joined MTSU in 2007 and was promoted to full Professor in 2021. He teaches undergraduate physical chemistry courses and laboratories, serving as the physical chemistry laboratory coordinator. As a member of the graduate faculty, he instructs the applied computational science course in the MTSU Computational and Data Science Ph.D. program. His dedication to innovative teaching earned him the MTSU Foundation’s 2009 Special Projects award and the 2016 Outstanding Achievement in Instructional Technology award.

In the Computation/Theoretical Chemistry research focus area, Volkov specializes in density-normalized spherical harmonics, theoretical quantum-mechanical modeling, and experimental X-ray diffraction studies of chemical bonding in molecules and crystals. He develops stereoscopic 3D visualization technologies to improve spatial skills and content learning across disciplines like chemistry, engineering, physics, biology, and medicine. Volkov authored two book chapters and more than 40 peer-reviewed articles. Select publications include "Ab Initio Quality Electrostatic Atomic and Molecular Properties Including Intermolecular Energies from a Transferable Theoretical Pseudoatom Databank" (2004), "The experimental charge-density approach in the evaluation of intermolecular interactions. Application of a new module of the XD programming package to several solids including a pentapeptide" (2000), and "Fast analytical evaluation of intermolecular electrostatic interaction energies from charge density models" (2020). He created the DenProp program for quantum-chemical density analysis, utilized by international research groups, and co-developed the XD2016 package for charge density refinement and analysis. With 2,927 citations, his contributions have advanced computational chemistry and electron density studies.