Stefan Kilyanek

Stefan Kilyanek would prefer that you don’t read this profile.The inorganic electrochemist isn’t necessarily shy; he just doesn’t like calling attention to himself. That’s precisely why Timothy Brewster, an organometallic chemist at the University of Memphis, thought it would be best to suggest his collaborator for Trailblazers without getting permission. “We nominated him without asking—because we knew if we asked first, he’d have told us not to,” Brewster says.Kilyanek runs a research group at the University of Arkansas, where he’s been since 2014. In the most basic sense, his laboratory takes toluene or alkanes and “turns those into other useful things,” such as halogenated toluenes or benzyl alcohols, he says. The group’s main approach is to oxidize carbon-hydrogen bonds using a process called hydrogen atom abstraction.More broadly, Kilyanek’s group is trying to control proton-coupled electron transfer to inorganic hydrogen atom acceptors. This is basically breaking a bond by pulling an electron out of it, while simultaneously plucking a hydrogen atom off the molecule to make the electron easier to pull out. But how willing the hydrogen atom acceptor is to take on that proton can determine which bonds Kilyanek’s group can oxidize. “We want to be able to tune our hydrogen atom acceptors in such a way that we can say, ‘We can break that bond, but we can’t break this bond,’ ” Kilyanek says. He wants to pick apart the mechanisms of these complicated electrochemical reactions, Brewster says. “He thinks very deeply about what he does.” In 2016, Kilyanek won a prestigious