Douglas H. Turner

Douglas "Doug" H. Turner is an American chemist and Professor of Chemistry at the University of Rochester.^[1]

Douglas H. Turner
Website	http://rna.chem.rochester.edu/

Early life

Doug Turner grew up in Brooklyn, where he claimed, "As a stickball player I developed the best curveball and screwball on my block".

Education

He attended Harvard College, where he graduated cum laude in Chemistry before grade inflation and was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the U.S. Army. He did his graduate work in the Chemistry Departments of Columbia University and Brookhaven National Labs, where he worked with George Flynn and Norman Sutin to develop the Raman laser temperature jump method for measuring kinetics on a nanosecond time scale. During this period, he also spent three months in Anniston, Alabama taking the Officer's Basic Course of the Army's Chemical Corp. Deciding that he liked science more than war, he turned down the opportunity to continue as an active duty officer and went to the University of California to postdoc with Ignacio Tinoco, Jr.. There, he invented fluorescence detected circular dichroism for measuring the optical activity of the fluorescent component of a solution.

In 1975, Doug joined the faculty of the Chemistry Department at the University of Rochester, where he is now a Professor. That same year, he met his future wife, Joanna Olmsted, who had just joined the faculty of the Biology Department at Rochester. Doug was also lucky to be part of the academic family of Tom Cech during 2 sabbatical years at University of Colorado at Boulder, where he learned much about biochemistry and biology. Doug has been unusually lucky with his own academic family of 9 postdocs, 32 students who have graduated with Ph.D.'s, and his other collaborators. Together, they have discovered many of the fundamental principles that determine RNA structure. This has helped advance methods for predicting RNA structure from sequence so that the methods are widely used by biochemists and biologists. Papers published by the group since 1983 have been cited over 6,000 times. The work has also been recognized by Sloan and Guggenheim Fellowships, election as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, continuous funding of an NIH grant that started in 1976, and coauthorship of more than 180 papers.

Doug has also served the scientific community by often teaching the first year undergraduate Chemistry course and the graduate biophysical chemistry course, by being a member of several NIH Study Sections, the Advisory Board of the Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry in Poznan, and the editorial board of the Biophysical Journal. He also co-chaired a Nucleic Acids Gordon Conference.

Research

References

1. ^ Turner, D H; N Sugimoto, S M Freier (1988). "RNA Structure Prediction". Annual Review of Biophysics and Biophysical Chemistry 17 (1): 167–192. doi:10.1146/annurev.bb.17.060188.001123. ISSN 0883-9182. 

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