2011 Prize Winner
Gareth Alun Morris, Professor of Physical Chemistry,
School of Chemistry, The University of Manchester, UK
Awarded contribution:
Gareth A. Morris, and Ray Freeman: “Enhancement of nuclear magnetic resonance signals by polarization transfer”, J. Am. Chem. Soc. 101, 760-762 (1979).
The Technology:
INEPT is an ingenious pulse sequence, originally devised for signal enhancement in liquid state NMR of insensitive nuclei such as carbon-13 and nitrogen-15, by broadband polarization transfer from proton spins. Since its inception it has evolved, as a means of bi-directional polarization transfer between coupled spins, into a major component of modern multidimensional NMR techniques, with applications in liquids, liquid crystals and solids. The impact of INEPT, transcending its remarkably simple theoretical and experimental foundation, has made it an indispensable component of the state-of-the-art NMR toolkit.
The Russell Varian Prize
The Russell Varian Prize honors the memory of the pioneer behind the first commercial Nuclear Magnetic Resonance spectrometers and co-founder of Varian Associates. The prize is awarded to a researcher based on a single innovative contribution (a single paper, patent, lecture, or piece of hardware) that has proven of high and broad impact on state-of-the-art NMR technology.
The prize aims to award the initial contribution that laid the ground for the specific technology of great importance in state-of-the-art NMR. It is sponsored by Agilent Technologies and carries a monetary award of 15,000 Euro. The 2011 award ceremony will take place at the EUROMAR 2011 in Frankfurt, Germany, August 21.
Rules for the Russell Varian Prize
- Only single pieces of work are considered (a paper, a lecture, a patent, etc).
- In case of multiple authorship, the prize is awarded to the author with the largest creative and innovative share of the contribution. Only in exceptional cases of truly equal shares can the prize be split between two authors of the same contribution.
- No individual can receive the prize more than once.
- Prize winners become members of the Advisory Board for the Russell Varian Prize that evaluates future nominations and makes recommendations to the Prize Committee.
Prize Committee 2011
Christian Griesinger, Jean Jeener (Chairman), Ēriks Kupče, Alexander Pines, Thomas Prisner (EUROMAR 2011 representative), Vladimír Sklenář (Secretary), and Ole W. Sørensen
Advisory Board for the Russell Varian Prize
Erwin Hahn, Nicolaas Bloembergen, John S. Waugh, Alfred G. Redfield, Albert W. Overhauser, Martin Karplus
Former Russell Varian Prize Laureates and Laudatios