Rate My Professor Robert Dickson

Robert Dickson is the Vasser Woolley Professor of Chemistry in the School of Chemistry & Biochemistry at the Georgia Institute of Technology, a position he has held since joining the faculty in 1998. He earned a B.A. from Haverford College in 1991 and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1996. Dr. Dickson served as Senior Editor of The Journal of Physical Chemistry from 2010 to 2021 and has maintained continuous research funding primarily from the NIH since 2000. His distinguished career includes awards such as the NSF Faculty Early CAREER Award in 1999, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship and Blanchard Assistant Professorship in 2001, Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award in 2002, Georgia Tech Outstanding Achievement in Research Program Development Award in 2007, and recognition as a Visiting Lecturer by the National Science Council in Taiwan. He holds the Vasser Woolley Chair in Chemistry.

Dr. Dickson's research specializes in physical chemistry and spectroscopy, developing novel spectroscopic, statistical, and imaging technologies for dynamics in biology and medicine. His group focuses on noble metal quantum dots, including silver and gold nanoclusters, for sensitive single-molecule, cellular, and in vivo imaging; optically modulatable fluorescent proteins to distinguish bound versus diffusing species and study protein interactions; and bioinformatics approaches for rapid antibiotic susceptibility testing from positive blood cultures and comparative genomics. Key publications include 'On/off blinking and switching behaviour of single molecules of green fluorescent protein' (Nature, 1997), a seminal work cited as key to W.E. Moerner’s 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry; 'Highly fluorescent noble-metal quantum dots' (Annual Review of Physical Chemistry, 2007); 'Highly fluorescent, water-soluble, size-tunable gold quantum dots' (Physical Review Letters, 2004); 'DNA-templated Ag nanocluster formation' (Journal of the American Chemical Society, 2004); and 'Photoactivated fluorescence from individual silver nanoclusters' (Science, 2001). Recent contributions encompass rapid label-free antibiotic susceptibility testing (Cytometry Part A, 2023) and fluorescence-informed photoacoustic imaging (Photoacoustics, 2023), advancing diagnostics and bioimaging.