Gavin Earl Crooks is known for his work on non-equilibrium thermodynamics and

statistical mechanics In physics, statistical mechanics is a mathematical framework that applies statistical methods and probability theory to large assemblies of microscopic entities. It does not assume or postulate any natural laws, but explains the macroscopic be ...

. He discovered the

Crooks fluctuation theorem The Crooks fluctuation theorem (CFT), sometimes known as the Crooks equation, is an equation in statistical mechanics that relates the work done on a system during a non-equilibrium transformation to the free energy difference between the final an ...

, a general statement about the free energy difference between the initial and final states of a non-equilibrium transformation.

Career

Crooks received his B.Sc. in

Chemistry Chemistry is the science, scientific study of the properties and behavior of matter. It is a natural science that covers the Chemical element, elements that make up matter to the chemical compound, compounds made of atoms, molecules and ions ...

from the

University of East Anglia The University of East Anglia (UEA) is a public research university in Norwich, England. Established in 1963 on a campus west of the city centre, the university has four faculties and 26 schools of study. The annual income of the institution f ...

in 1992 and his M.Sc. in Biocolloid Chemistry from the same university in 1993. His master's advisor was R. H. Robinson, and his thesis was entitled "Characterization of Lipases in Water-in-Oil Microemulsions". He earned his Ph.D. at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

under David Chandler in 1999. During this time, he explored both equilibrium and nonequilibrium statistical mechanics. He did significant work on

transition path sampling Transition path sampling (TPS) is a Rare Event Sampling method used in computer simulations of rare events: physical or chemical transitions of a system from one stable state to another that occur too rarely to be observed on a computer timescale. ...

as well as nonequilibrium statistical mechanics. He briefly left science to work for an internet startup doughtnet.com, but he later returned to theoretical chemistry, accepting a postdoctoral fellowship with the Computational Genomics Research Group led by Steven Brenner. Crooks is now a senior research scientist at

Rigetti Computing Rigetti Computing is a Berkeley, California-based developer of quantum integrated circuits used for quantum computers. The company also develops a cloud platform called Forest that enables programmers to write quantum algorithms. History Rigetti ...

. He was awarded a

Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers The Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) is the highest honor bestowed by the United States government on outstanding scientists and engineers in the early stages of their independent research careers. The White ...

in 2009. He has an

h-index The ''h''-index is an author-level metric that measures both the productivity and citation impact of the publications, initially used for an individual scientist or scholar. The ''h''-index correlates with obvious success indicators such as winn ...

of 36 according to

Google Scholar Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in beta in November 2004, the Google Scholar index includes p ...

References

Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Alumni of the University of East Anglia University of California, Berkeley alumni British chemists Computational chemists Fellows of the American Physical Society Recipients of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers {{UK-chemist-stub