COURTESY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAMPeter Mansfield, the physicist formerly of the University of Nottingham whose research supported the development of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), died last week (February 8). He was 83.
As a 15-year-old dropout, Mansfield was an unlikely Nobel laureate (and knight). He worked at England’s Rocket Propulsion Department while taking evening classes to get into university, and eventually attended Queen Mary College (now Queen Mary University London), where he learned about nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), the physical phenomenon in which nuclei exposed to a magnetic field absorb and re-emit electromagnetic radiation. Used primarily for chemical analysis at the time, Mansfield “astounded the NMR research community by demonstrating that an NMR signal thought to be lost could be recovered and used,” Peter Morris, head of Sir Peter Mansfield Imaging Centre at the University of Nottingham, wrote in The Conversation.
In 1964, Mansfield started as a lecturer at Nottingham, where he set to work improving NMR-based ...
