Nobel laureate Sir Peter Mansfield passes away

Renowned physicist and Nobel laureate Sir Peter Mansfield passed away on 8 February 2017 in London, England. He was 83.

Mansfield, along with Paul Lauterbur, had won the 2003 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for developing magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

About Sir Peter Mansfield

• Sir Peter Mansfield was an English physicist. He also served as a professor at the University of Nottingham.

• Born on 9 October 1933 in London, he developed an interest in rocketry at the age of 18.

• He took up a job with the Rocket Propulsion Department of the Ministry of Supply in Westcott, Buckinghamshire. Eighteen months later, he was called up for National Service.

• In 1959, he earned a BSc from Queen Mary's.

• In 1962, he received a PhD. His thesis was titled Proton magnetic resonance relaxation in solids by transient methods.

• In 1968, he was appointed Senior Lecturer at Nottingham University. In 1970, he was appointed as a Reader. During this period, his team developed the MRI equipment with the help of grants from the Medical Research Council. In 1990, he was appointed Professor of the Department of Physics until his retirement in 1994.

• He is credited with showing how the radio signals from MRI can be mathematically analysed, making interpretation of the signals into a useful image a possibility.

• He is also credited with discovering how fast imaging could be possible by developing the MRI protocol called echo-planar imaging.