Yes, interesting problem. I don’t see a way to use term lists as they don’t allow font attributes. People have had similar requests for terms needing to be italicized, for example.
If a standardized list of names, I wonder if it would it be possible to maybe run a macro on the file before importing to achieve the bolding requirements and whether they could be retained after importing?
Googling “bold specific authors in references” I only see LaTex and biblatex solutions, and they are still pretty search and replace dependent, with shared surname problems. But you propably knew that…