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Scientist and community leader Dr TV George passed away

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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.