 Now that Thunderfoot, aka Phil Mason, has made his decision to reveal his personal information, we could finally talk about his research. Some have characterized him as a glorified technician because he's not listed under faculty, but rather under staff on the website of the university by which he was employed. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Professor is usually someone who runs a lab, but doesn't usually have time to generate data or conduct research. A professor or principal investigator spends most of their time writing grant proposals, papers, and in some cases teaching or in administrative roles in their own research and within the organization. What Thunderfoot is or was is much closer to a research fellow, someone employed to do nothing but research. Staff, not faculty, but clearly an independent and productive researcher, someone who has had a positive impact on human scientific knowledge. Here is papers in PubMed, so far as I can tell, and I have to warn you that there are at least two people with nearly the same name doing very similar work, so I'm having to make some guesses. If I've gotten this right, he has 34 publications starting in 2003. He's first author on 20 of them, which means that he contributed to the work more than any of the other authors. The pubs are generally in physical chemistry journals of the second or third tier, meaning they're the kind of journals for routine but important work. He does have one first author in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, which is a definite prestige journal. To just summarize his publication record, it's tenure-level research for a very specific field of physical chemistry. He's been consistently productive in high-quality publications for over nine years. He could absolutely take this CV and be a serious contender for an associate professor spot at a top university. His research focuses on molecular modeling from neutron scatter data, which I'll try to explain as best I understand it. This is way outside my own field, so I may be completely off base. Neutron scattering is a way of studying the physical structure of matter. You take a sample, usually a powder, and place it near a nuclear reactor or source of energetic neutrons. Neutrons are neutral but massive, so when they go shooting through the sample, they'll sometimes collide with the nuclei of atoms in the substance and be deflected from straight through lines. The same process can be done with x-rays, and that's how the structure of DNA was finally deduced. In Dr. Mason's, and yes, he is a PhD, so Dr. Mason is the respectful name, in his case he is often studying the way that it dissolves substance, like fluoride, interacts with the solution that it's in. Where are the solutes in relation to the solvent? One area he seems to come back to often is the nature of water and guanidinium interaction. Guanidinium is important in my field of molecular biology because it's what is known as a chaotropic salt. We use it to mess up the structure of proteins, either to study them, or just to make them fall out of solution. Dr. Mason is helping to explain how they perform that useful function. By reading out the deflection of neutrons, he's observed the stacking or arrangement of these solute molecules was water or other solvent. He then creates a simulation of the laws that govern their behavior, and tests the experimental observations against the simulation. If they match, then we'll know how these things behave in solution. Are there applications for this kind of work? Absolutely. Think about the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. What kind of modification could we make to the petroleum to encourage to either form little globules or to break up that surface tension? In the case of drugs or industrial chemicals, can we optimize the chemical composition of a solvent or buffer so that the water-loving structures remain stable over time, increasing shelf life or availability for reaction? It is a very abstract field of research studying the structure of solutions of salt and water, but it's a peek into the fundamental nature of matter and salvation. That's salvation, by the way. Solvation. The nature of solutions. Not to be confused with the religious concept. Not everyone likes Thunderfoot. I understand he's a very bold character. He doesn't pull any punches. Ultimately, though, he's just a guy with some strongly held positions. People like to watch his videos, and he communicates science very well. That's given him a certain celebrity. With that celebrity will naturally come criticism and personal attacks. The one thing that you can't say about Thunderfoot, no matter how much you dislike him, is that his work is unimportant or unimpressive. His contributions to scientific knowledge are respect worthy, even if you don't like his work here on YouTube. Thanks for watching.