December 29th, 2023 by Stephan Grzesiek
Andrew Byrd (National Cancer Institute, Frederick, USA), Julie Forman-Kay (Hospital for Sick Children, U. Toronto, Canada), Alexej Jerschow (Department of Chemistry, New York University, USA), Bernd Reif (Department of Chemistry, Technical University Munich, Germany) have been elected as Fellows of ISMAR in December 2023. Congratulations to these four outstanding scientists, all of whom have made novel and impactful contributions to magnetic resonance.
Fellows are elected on the basis of their contributions to the field of magnetic resonance, both through the impact of their research on the magnetic resonance community itself and through their efforts to advance the appreciation of magnetic resonance in the broader scientific community. Fellowship in ISMAR carries with it an associated responsibility to serve as an advocate for the field of magnetic resonance.
Each year, ISMAR solicits nominations for new Fellows from all regular members of ISMAR. Nominations are first evaluated by the ISMAR Fellows Committee. A list of candidates is then sent to current Fellows for voting, based on both scientific achievements and contributions to the magnetic resonance community. No more than four new Fellows are elected each year.
The next call for nominations will be issued towards the end of 2024.
November 29th, 2023 by Stephan Grzesiek
As you may know, EUROMAR as a subdivision of the Groupement Ampere, organizes annual Magnetic Resonance meetings in Europe.
The ISMAR Council and the EUROMAR Board of Trustees (BoT) have agreed to hold a joint Magnetic Resonance conference in Europe in the summer of 2027 (July or beginning of August). This joint conference will be a major international event, expecting to attract up to 1000 participants from all continents, featuring plenary, invited and contributed presentations on all subfields of Magnetic Resonance.
We are currently soliciting proposals from European Magnetic Resonance scientists who are interested in hosting this joint EUROMAR-ISMAR conference in their own country or region in 2027. If you are willing to carry out this important and rewarding task for the Magnetic Resonance community, please contact the EUROMAR BoT (anne.lesage@ens-lyon.fr, sabine.hediger@cea.fr) and ISMAR (stephan.grzesiek@unibas.ch, alexej.jerschow@nyu.edu) for an initial discussion.
Full proposals shall be submitted by May 31, 2024 to the above-mentioned contacts and include the following details: local organizing committee, location, overall budget, social program, means of access, sponsorship, etc. The proposals shall then be presented and assessed by representatives from EUROMAR and ISMAR during the EUROMAR conference in Bilbao on June 30–July 2024.
We are looking forward to receive your applications!
With best regards
Stephan Grzesiek (ISMAR President)
Anne Lesage (Chair of the EUROMAR BoT)
November 1st, 2023 by Stephan Grzesiek
The Magnetic Resonance community mourns the passing of Dr. h.c. Tony W. Keller on October 27, 2023, at the age of 86.
Tony Keller was an industrial pioneer at Bruker where he held key leadership positions for more than 50 years before retiring in 2010. He was a true innovator and introduced over many decades cutting-edge NMR technology comprising the first multinuclear Fourier-transform NMR spectrometers, superconducting NMR magnets, cryogenically cooled probes, and ultimately within the last decade also the 1.2 GHz ultra-high field NMR systems. An account of some of these pioneering developments was given by him in a 2019 JMR article.
Many of us knew Tony Keller as a sincere partner at Bruker who was devoted to technological advance and high quality of instrumentation.
Among many distinctions, Dr. Keller received multiple honorary doctoral degrees, was a honorary professor at the East China Normal University in Shanghai, and awarded the Otto Stern Prize by the German Chemical Society (GDCh). He was a honorary member of the GDCh Division of Magnetic Resonance and Fellow of ISMAR.
Our thoughts are with his family and friends.
The following tribute was written by Dr. Frank Laukien, President & CEO, Bruker Corporations
Dear ISMAR Colleagues,
We are saddened that our former colleague and friend, Dr. h.c. Tony W. Keller, an acclaimed pioneer in the field of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR), has passed away on October 27, 2023, at the age of 86.
Bruker intends to honor the memory of Dr. Keller at our NMR Users Meetings in November, and at several NMR conferences next year. We also envision a future NMR symposium to honor Tony scientifically for his enormous contributions to the field, and as a 'Celebration of the Life of Tony Keller'.
Tony enabled many innovations in the development of modern NMR technology and spectrometers. All of Tony’s colleagues at Bruker owe him enormously for his very significant leadership role in building up Bruker NMR, and developing it over decades into the leading technology innovator and committed market leader.
Tony was one of our greatest, most energetic leaders, and also a very admirable, dedicated and humble person. Tony was truly a NMR pioneer, a great man, and a dear mentor and friend to me and many others. We will fondly remember Tony for his numerous enabling contributions to NMR technology, his unwavering commitment to innovation, as well as his focus on our key collaborators and good customers. Tony was a brilliant NMR engineer and scientist, as well as an energetic and visionary entrepreneur, highly respected team leader and an inspiring, very successful senior business executive with highest integrity.
Early on in his career, Tony recognized the enormous potential of NMR to elucidate 3D molecular structures. His initial rf engineering work with early NMR scientists at ETH Zuerich fueled his passion for the magnetic resonance field. Throughout several decades, Tony was instrumental in establishing Bruker as the leading technological innovator in the NMR field. Tony held key leadership positions in Bruker for more than 50 years before retiring in 2010. He continued as an experienced, motivating Senior Advisor to Bruker until recently.
Tony is credited with the pivotal development of the world’s first multinuclear Fourier-transform NMR spectrometer, and he personally was first to record 13C-observe 1H-broadband decoupled spectra in Fourier-transform mode, a breakthrough that enabled modern NMR applications in chemistry.
His collaborative and innovation-driven approach contributed to the development of other groundbreaking and enabling NMR technologies, such as superconducting NMR magnets, digital spectrometers, cryogenically cooled probes, and ultimately even 1.2 GHz ultra-high field NMR systems.
These key innovations today are foundational for NMR in structural biology research, in metabolomics and applied markets, in pharmaceutical research, as well as in advanced materials and renewable energy research.
Not only was Tony an innovator in enabling technologies for the NMR community, but he was also deeply connected to the NMR scientific community worldwide, who had a trusted partner in Tony to integrate their scientific ideas into the Bruker technology developments and its next generation of innovative products.
For his enabling contributions to NMR, Dr. Keller received multiple honorary doctoral degrees, from the University of Florence, the Technical University of Berlin, and the University of Queensland, and was appointed honorary professor at the East China Normal University in Shanghai. Moreover, he was awarded the Otto Stern Prize by the GDCh, was an honorary member of the GDCh Division of Magnetic Resonance, and a Fellow of the International Society of Magnetic Resonance.
Tony’s legacy will continue to inspire future generations of scientists and engineers in the field of NMR technology and applications.
Frank H. Laukien, PhD
President & CEO, Bruker Corporation
Visiting Scholar, Harvard Chemistry & Chemical Biology
October 14th, 2023 by Stephan Grzesiek
The ISMAR Executive Committee unequivocally condemns the recent attacks by Hamas within Israel. These were acts of pure barbaric terrorism, killing and destroying the lives of many innocent people of all ages. We extend our most sincere expression of concern and sympathy to all ISMAR members and all others who were affected by these attacks, either directly or indirectly.
We encourage all ISMAR members to express their concerns and opinions through messages to their national leaders, donations, active participation in humanitarian organizations, and other activities. We sincerely hope solutions will be found in the very near future that allow all people in the Middle East to live in peace and security, so that they may contribute to the future progress of science and civilization.
The ISMAR Executive Committee
Stephan Grzesiek (President), Tatyana Polenova (Vice President), Rob Tycko (Past President), Alexej Jerschow (Secretary General), Rachel Martin (Treasurer)
July 24th, 2023 by Stephan Grzesiek
Jean Jeener at the 1998 International Symposium at the Université Libre de Bruxelles organized for the occasion of his retirement
The Magnetic Resonance community mourns the passing of Prof. Jean Louis Charles Jeener on June 10, 2023 at the age of 91 after a short illness.
Jean introduced two-dimensional NMR spectroscopy and proposed the COSY technique in a lecture at the AMPERE Summer School in Basko Polje, Yugoslavia, September 1971, which was then experimentally demonstrated by Richard R. Ernst. Later, Jean also introduced the NOESY experiment.
His research interest in NMR started with spin thermodynamics and dynamics in solids (“Jeener-Broekaert sequence” for observing dipolar order in solids), progressively extending towards two-dimensional spectroscopy in liquids, superoperators, peak shapes in the presence of molecular rearrangements, the formulation of pulse spectroscopy with full quantization of the field, radiation damping and dipolar field effects in liquids.
Jean was professor of Physics at the Université Libre de Bruxelles from 1960 until he retired in 1996.
Among many distinctions, Jean received the ISMAR Prize in 2001, the Prix Quinquennal of the Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique, the Ampère Prize, the Russell Varian Prize, the Otto Stern Prize, and was an ISMAR fellow.
Our thoughts are with his family and friends.
The following tribute was written by Guy Lippens, Paul Broekaert, and Alain Vlassenbroek
Jean Jeener was born in 1931. He obtained Chemistry and Physics degrees from the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) in 1953 and 1954. He earned a PhD with Prof I. Prigogine, later Chemistry Nobel Prize winner for his contributions to non-equilibrium thermodynamics, which was followed by a postdoctoral stay with Prof. N. Bloembergen, one of the founders of NMR and later Physics Nobel Prize winner for laser spectroscopy. This academic background explains his initial project upon his return as a professor at the ULB in 1960 to study spin thermodynamics. Transforming the Zeeman order into spin-spin order through a two-pulse sequence (the Jeener-Broekaert echo) was a major contribution from the Brussels group but already carried the idea of increasing the number of pulses to probe new physics. When Jean came up with the idea of a double Fourier Transform and thereby introduced the principle of 2D NMR, experimental difficulties with the home-built apparatus prevented them from realizing the experiment, but not of distributing the idea in the community. It was taken up in the Basko Polje Summer School by Dr. Thomas Baumann, then a graduate student student of Prof. Richard Ernst, who immediately realized its importance and actually managed to implement the idea. A reprint of the historical 1971 lecture notes is available here (Jeener and Alewaeters, Prog. NMR Spec. 94–95, 75–80, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pnmrs.2016.03.002, 2016). Richard Ernst's note to Jean and Dr. Paul Broekaert upon receiving the Chemistry Nobel Prize in 1991 is unambiguous about the intellectual contribution of the Brussels group.
Note to Jean Jeener by Richard Ernst when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry
What follows are some very personal recollections by one of us (GL). After a physics undergraduate from Ghent University and Cornell University, I was formally a PhD student in Ghent, but actually doing research in the Biochemistry department at ULB, using solution NMR spectroscopy to obtain the conformation of the oxytocin hormone. People had pointed out to me that Prof. Jeener was an authority in NMR, so I went to see him quite naively with an NMR-related question. When I told him my background, he immediately became enthusiastic, and questioned me about my knowledge of raising and lowering operators to describe the electromagnetic field. “We treat the spin as a quantum object, so doesn’t it surprise you that we treat the pulse as a classical object?” was his question. Three hours of blackboard development later, I left his office without an answer to my (trivial!) question but convinced that I could learn a lot from this professor. As a side note, it took ten more years before he published together with Prof. F. Henin (his wife) the presentation of pulsed nuclear magnetic resonance with full quantization of the radio frequency magnetic field. And when taking him out for dinner together with Erwin Hahn and his wife at the 2004 EUROMAR meeting in Lille, they started scribbling on all napkins to extend the quantum description to the actual coil as well …
As I performed a lot of molecular dynamics simulations during my PhD and wanted to simulate NMR variables such as proton T1 and T2 relaxation times, I took great profit from Jean's earlier work on gypsum demonstrating that one could treat a system of water molecules as an assembly of independent protons, neglecting spin correlations of the two proton spins on the same water molecule. Without any official appointment as a PhD advisor, he took all the time to go with me through these complex spin operator equations and encouraged me to (re)do the full Redfield relaxation theory in the super-operator formalism.
Upon moving to the Pasteur Institute of Lille after my PhD and getting access to a newly installed 600 MHz instrument with a cryogenic probe, our interactions actually became more frequent. We became his experimental laboratory to probe collective effects in NMR ranging from radiation damping to long-range dipolar field effects. In one of these projects, we needed a tiny capillary in a rotor. Jean asked for a Bunsen burner and drew a pipette to the 0.3 mm diameter that they had calculated would reduce the amount of radiation damping. Observing the capillary under a microscope, its diameter proved to be 0.31mm, underscoring that he was first of all a gifted experimentalist. When at the 1994 EENC in Oulu, a heated debate broke out between two eminent members of the NMR community about the quantum or classical description of these collective dipolar field effects, Jean Jeener was there to calm down the debate. This made me fully realize for the first time his authoritative position in the NMR field. He would later publish a paper on the equivalency of both viewpoints.
The last years of his life, Jean Jeener remained interested in NMR but also in the progress of astrophysics and science in general. The interpretation of quantum mechanics was a point where he was intransigent (for an example published only in March 2023, see Jeener, J. L.: More on the demons of thermodynamics, Physics Today, 76, 12–13, https://doi.org/10.1063/PT.3.5187, 2023), and he found a similar mindset in Prof. David Mermin. Finally, a couple of weeks before his passing away, he was awarded the Otto Stern Prize, for his lifetime career.
Award of the Otto Stern Prize of the Gesellschaft Deutscher Chemiker to Prof. Jean Jeener on April 15, 2023 by Prof. Jörg Matysik (left) and Prof. Christian Griesinger (right)
With the passing of Jean Jeener, another of the initial heroes of NMR disappears. His legacy, together with that of the other towering figures, will however remain for the generations to come.
Anyone who knew Jean Jeener will know that this great scientist possessed a natural wisdom in many areas, while remaining modest and humble and demonstrating great humanity. Jean will be greatly missed as a caring and inspiring mentor, a dedicated teacher, a friend, and a wonderful person who had the ability to touch people's lives ...
May 7th, 2023 by Stephan Grzesiek
ISMAR mourns the passing of James S. Hyde, PhD, Professor Emeritus of Biophysics at the Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW), who passed away peacefully at the age of 90 years, on August 13, 2022. Jim was a giant in multiple fields and an ISMAR Fellow. His brilliant ideas and research shaped the fields of EPR and MRI and were instrumental to the formation of the National Biomedical EPR Center and the Biophysics Research Institute, which then became the Department of Biophysics at MCW. He will be missed by the Magnetic Resonance community. Read more about Dr. Hyde’s life in his MCW obituary or on Wikipedia.
April 23rd, 2023 by Stephan Grzesiek
The ISMAR Prize Committee has selected the recipients of the 2023 ISMAR Prize and the 2023 Abragam Prize. The ISMAR Prize recipient is Dr. Ad Bax from the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, USA, a world leader in the development of NMR methods for the study of proteins and nucleic acids. The Abragam Prize recipient is Prof. Ashok Ajoy of the University of California Berkeley, a pioneer in the development of new magnetic resonance methods based on quantum technologies for nanoscale MRI, quantum sensing and optical hyperpolarization-based NMR.
The ISMAR Executive Committee has also selected Prof. Songi Han of the University of California, Santa Barbara, to be the 2023 Paul Callaghan Lecturer. Prof. Han's work pushes the frontiers of magnetic resonance spectroscopy and relaxometry for the study of biomolecular interactions, biomolecular and materials surfaces, and the property of their hydration layers.
We congratulate Drs. Bax, Ajoy and Han, and we look forward to their lectures on the opening of day of the 2023 ISMAR conference in Brisbane on August 20. Please see https://www.ismar2023.org for details.
March 23rd, 2023 by Stephan Grzesiek
All of Barry Shapiro's 516 NMR Newsletters are now completely available in digital form at the ISMAR website
https://ismar.org/barry-shapiros-nmr-newsletters/. We are very glad that we could secure this treasure for the magnetic resonance community and beyond.
ISMAR is extremely grateful to Dr. Clemens Anklin (Bruker) who tirelessly scanned the issues over months and months with some help in the last stages by Alexandra Meng (University of Basel).
The project was initially triggered by a tweet by Dr. Frances Separovic (Melbourne U). We thank Brian Sykes from the University of Alberta, Beth Moscato and Seth Johnson from Corteva, Scott Riley from Tecmag, Matthias Ernst from the ETH Zurich, and Michelle DiMeo of the Science History Institute Philadelphia for the contribution of missing volumes to this collection. We also want to acknowledge the support for this project by Barry Shapiro’s wife Lee Shapiro and his two daughters Catherine Shapiro and Miriam Shapiro Schwartz.
December 26th, 2022 by Stephan Grzesiek
Marina Bennati (MPI Multidisciplinary Sciences, Göttingen, Germany), Roberta Pierattelli (University of Florence, Italy) and Ayyalusamy Ramamoorthy (University of Michigan, USA) were elected to become Fellows of ISMAR in December 2022. Congratulations to these three outstanding scientists, all of whom have made novel and impactful contributions to magnetic resonance. Their work covers many aspects of magnetic resonance research, including the development and demonstration of new experimental techniques, new experimental apparatuses, applications to a wide range of scientific problems, as well as efforts to advance the appreciation of magnetic resonance in the scientific community.
Each year, ISMAR solicits nominations for new Fellows from all regular members of ISMAR. Nominations are first evaluated by the ISMAR Fellows Committee. A list of candidates is then sent to current Fellows for voting, based on both scientific achievements and contributions to the magnetic resonance community. No more than four new Fellows are elected each year.
The ISMAR Executive Committee encourages you to submit nominations. The next call for nominations will be issued in September 2023.
September 10th, 2022 by Alexej Jerschow
The Fellows Committee of the International Society of Magnetic Resonance invites you to submit nominations for new ISMAR Fellows. All regular members and current Fellows of ISMAR may submit nominations every year. The deadline for nominations this year is October 30, 2022.
The nomination form is here:
https://forms.gle/LQ628dTyqjEEwQAr9
A list of current Fellows can be found at https://ismar.org/ismar-organization/. Fellows are recognized for contributions to the field of magnetic resonance and to ISMAR. Fellows need not be current ISMAR members. In the spirit of ISMAR, all branches of magnetic resonance are considered.
In accordance with the ISMAR Constitution, the Fellows Committee will select up to 10 candidates from the nominations. Up to four new Fellows will then be chosen by vote of the current Fellows. The Fellows Committee pays serious attention both to research achievements and to involvement in ISMAR activities (speaking or attendance at previous meetings, service on various committees).
The Committee believes that this approach is consistent with the original motivations for creating a class of Fellows, going back to the original arguments of Paul Callaghan: “The goal is not to create an additional résumé line, but to recognize people in a way that would strengthen the society." Nomination statements should specifically address both of these factors and be sensitive to gender equality.
Nominations remain active for three years after original submission, but updates are welcome.
All nominations, must include a seconder, provide a nomination statement (max 2500 characters), and a maximum of 6 important publications. For inquiries, or questions, please contact alexej.jerschow@nyu.edu.
