Alfred G. Redfield

Not to be confused with Alfred C. Redfield.

Alfred G. Redfield
Alfred G. Redfield in his mid eighties
Born
Alfred Guillou Redfield

(1929-03-11)March 11, 1929.[1]
Milton, Massachusetts, U.S.
Died(2019-07-24)July 24, 2019
Alameda, California, United States
EducationHarvard College (BA),

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (MS),

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (PhD)
Scientific career
Fields
Institutions

Alfred G. Redfield (March 11, 1929 – July 24, 2019) was an American physicist and biochemist. In 1955 he published the Redfield relaxation theory, effectively moving the practice of NMR or Nuclear magnetic resonance from the realm of classical physics to the realm of semiclassical physics.[2] He continued to find novel magnetic resonance applications to solve real-world problems throughout his life.

Redfield earned degrees at Harvard College (BA 1950, Master's 1952) and University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (Ph.D. 1953). As a post-doc he worked with Nicolaas Bloembergen at Harvard, where he first published the Redfield relaxation theory. IBM Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory hired him in 1955 and he taught at Columbia.While there he published his most important work, the Redfield Relaxation Equation.

In 1971 he published experiments that helped to draw the veil of H2O molecules away from hitherto invisible atoms in large, biological molecules.[3] He continued to innovate specific NMR techniques to view the molecular structure of nucleic acids and enzymes. Beginning in 1996 the NMR Field Cycling community began to realize that slow NMR had an advantage over X-ray crystallography for observing large, biological molecule(macromolecule) dynamics,[4] which can't be captured by high energy NMR or crystallography. In 1996 he released an article exploring field cycling as a way to study macromolecules in more detail.[5][6][7][8] He published his first article using the phosphorus isotope 31P to probe phospholipids in 2004.[9]

He became a fellow of the American Physical Society in 1959 was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1979, and named a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) in 1983. Redfield received the Max Delbruck Prize from the American Physical Society in 2006.[1] In 2007 he was recognized with the Russell Varian Prize for contributing the Redfield Relaxation Theory to the field of nuclear magnetic resonance.[10][11]

Redfield is descended from a family of pioneering scientists, including his father, Alfred C. Redfield, his second great-grandfather, William Charles Redfield, and his great-grandfather, the naturalist John Howard Redfield.

  1. ^ a b Pochapsky, Thomas C. (2020). "Alfred G. Redfield (1929–2019)" (PDF). Biographical Memoirs. National Academy of Sciences. Retrieved August 12, 2024.
  2. ^ Pollard, W. Thomas; Felts, Anthony K.; Friesner, Richard A. (September 9, 2009). "The Redfield Equation in Condensed-Phase Quantum Dynamics". In Prigogine, Ilya; Rice, Stuart A. (eds.). New Methods of Computational Quantum Mechanics. John Wiley & Sons. pp. 77–134. ISBN 978-0-470-14205-9.
  3. ^ Patt, Steven L.; Sykes, Brian D. (1972). "Water Eliminated Fourier Transform NMR Spectroscopy". Journal of Chemical Physics. 56 (6): 3182. Bibcode:1972JChPh..56.3182P. doi:10.1063/1.1677669.
  4. ^ Bax, A.; Torchia, Dennis A. (2007). "Molecular Machinery in Action". Nature.
  5. ^ Brunger, A.T. (1997). "X-ray crystallography and NMR reveal complementary views of structure and dynamics". Nature Structural & Molecular Biology. 4 Suppl: 862–865. PMID 9377160.
  6. ^ Hu, Yunfei; Cheng, Kai (2021). "NMR-Based Methods for Protein Analysis". Anal. Chem. 93 (4): 1866–1879. doi:10.1021/acs.analchem.0c03830. PMID 33439619. S2CID 231604522.
  7. ^ Farrar, Christian T.; Halkides, Chris; Singel, David J. (1997). "The frozen solution structure of p21 ras determined by ESEEM spectroscopy reveals weak coordination of Thr35 to the active site metal ion". Structure. 5 (8): 1055–1066. doi:10.1016/S0969-2126(97)00257-8. PMID 9309221.
  8. ^ Redfield, Alfred G. (1996). Rao, B. D. Nageswara; Kemple, Marvin D (eds.). NMR as a Structural Tool for Macromolecules. Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis (IUPUI) Indianapolis USA: Springer, Boston, MA. pp. 123–132. doi:10.1007/978-1-4613-0387-9. ISBN 978-1-4613-0387-9. S2CID 9936189.
  9. ^ Roberts, M.F.; Hedstrom, Lizbeth. (2022). "High Resolution 31P Field Cycling NMR Reveals Unsuspected Features of Enzyme-Substrate-Cofactor Dynamics". Frontiers in Molecular Biosciences. 9: 865519. doi:10.3389/fmolb.2022.865519. PMC 9009223. PMID 35433832.
  10. ^ Joynt, R.; Nguyen, Bich Ha; Nguyen, V. (2010). "Theory of decoherence of N-state quantum systems in the Born–Markov approximation". Physics Advances in Natural Sciences: Nanoscience and Nanotechnology. 1 (2): 023001. Bibcode:2010ANSNN...1b3001J. doi:10.1088/2043-6254/1/2/023001. S2CID 135870765.
  11. ^ Kuzemsky, A.L. (2006). "Statistical Theory of Spin Relaxation and Diffusion in Solids". Journal of Low Temperature Physics. 143 (5–6): 213–256. arXiv:cond-mat/0512182. Bibcode:2006JLTP..143..213K. doi:10.1007/s10909-006-9219-3. S2CID 54862877.