Symposium Celebrating the 60th Birthday of Professor Douglas H. Turner

Biography of Douglas H. Turner

Doug Turner grew up in Brooklyn, where as a stickball player he developed the best curveball and screwball on his block. He attended Harvard College, where he graduated cum laude in Chemistry before grade inflation and was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the US 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. There he was allowed to wear a light blue T-shirt after being designated a “super jock.” The Army has made bigger mistakes. 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 Nacho Tinoco. 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. They have since shared many of the trials, tribulations, and triumphs of academic life. It was made easier over the last 19 years by the lack of trials and tribulations in raising their son, Ricky. 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.

Because there are no stickball courts in Rochester, Doug now gets his excitement by continuing to work with students to try to understand the curves of RNA.

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