America
Scientist and community leader Dr TV George passed away
Scientist and community leader, Dr TV George of Thonipurackal-Thycoodam passed away on Sunday, May 10.
He served as president of the Kerala Association of Greater Washington (KAGW)
in 1983.
Family will receive friends at St. Peter & Paul Antiochian Orthodox
Christian Church, 10620 River Road,
Potomac, Maryland
on Friday, May 15 from 5 to 8:30 pm.
The funeral service will be held there on Saturday, May 16 at 10 a.m. Interment
will be private.
Dr. George was born in Puthuppally, Kottayan, Kerala. He graduated from St
George English High School, Puthuppally in 1952. He earned his bachelors degree
with a first class from Madras Christian College,
Madras, in physics
with mathematics and chemistry as the minor subjects.
He came to the United States
with a tuition-free scholarship to obtain his MS and PhD in electrical engineering
at the University
of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign. After his graduation, he worked there as an assistant professor
in electrical engineering there as well.
His PhD thesis gave the first complete experimental proof of
the Rayleigh Scattering Theory, propounded nearly a century before Dr. George's
work. He moved to Pittsburgh,
PA for a position as a senior engineer
at Westinghouse Research Laboratory. He was the first to measure the
temperature of laser-produced plasma by Thompson Scattering, which is now a
standard technique used in inertial fusion research.
Ultimately, he achieved his goal of working for the Federal government in the Washington DC
area, as a nuclear physicist in the Office of Fusion Energy Sciences at the
Department of Energy. For 30 years until his retirement, as a DOE Program
Manager, he conducted oversight of research to achieve controlled thermonuclear
reactions and technology of heating fusion plasmas, especially the development
of megawatt gyrotrons in the submillimeter frequency range and
transmission/launching systems for electron cyclotron heating.
While he had an intellectual interest in all things connected to physics and
engineering, his expertise in plasma physics and nuclear fusion were special
loves. His work in these areas was recognized with many national and
international honors and up to the day of his death he continued to contribute
to these bodies of knowledge. Dr. George believed in the value of multilateral
exchanges of scientific information and dedicated much of his life to fostering
such exchanges with many countries, including China,
Japan, and Russia.
Dr. George also had a large presence in the Kerala community in Washington, DC
and was a well-respected member of Mar Gregorios Orthodox Church.
He is the beloved husband of Achamma Mathew George; cherished father of Dr. Asha M. George, Shobha S. George and Dr. Sageev T. George. He is also survived by a large extended family in India and throughout the world.