Rate My Professor George Thurston

George Thurston is a professor of physics in the School of Physics and Astronomy at Rochester Institute of Technology's College of Science. He earned an AB from Oberlin College and a PhD from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Thurston serves as Director of the Physics MS Program and program faculty in the School of Mathematics and Statistics. His career at RIT emphasizes research and graduate education in biological physics, where he leads efforts to understand molecular mechanisms in complex biological systems.

Thurston's research focuses on biological physics, including experimental and theoretical studies of phase transitions, solution phase properties, and critical phenomena in complex fluids. He examines the physical and chemical aspects of protein condensation diseases such as cataracts and sickle cell disease. Utilizing techniques like quasielastic and static light scattering, X-ray scattering, neutron scattering, nuclear magnetic resonance, and Monte Carlo simulations, his work covers protein mixtures, intrinsically disordered peptides, micelles, microemulsions, and biological polymers including hyaluronate. Current projects involve eye lens crystallin protein mixtures, protamine mixtures, charge regulation-mediated protein interactions, light scattering for Gibbs free energy measurements, and combined polarized neutron scattering with nuclear magnetic resonance. Key publications include "Hard Sphere-Like Glass Transition in Eye Lens α-Crystallin Solutions" (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2014), "Cataract-associated Mutant E107A of Human Gamma D-crystallin Shows Increased Attraction to Alpha-crystallin and Enhanced Light Scattering" (PNAS, 2011), "Basis for Calculating Cross Sections for Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spin-Modulated Polarized Neutron Scattering" (Journal of Chemical Physics, 2016), and "Charge-regulation phase transition on surface lattices of titratable sites adjacent to electrolyte solutions" (Physical Review E, 2015). Thurston collaborates in the Kotlarchyk-Thurston-Dholabhai Research Group on NSF-funded development of spin-modulated neutron scattering and has delivered invited presentations, such as on liquid-liquid phase separation in protein mixtures at Union College (2018).