Sir Peter Mansfield

Peter Mansfield was born in 1933 and studied his A-levels at night school.  He was admitted to study for a Physics degree at QMUL, graduating with a first-class honours BSc degree in 1959.  His final year project involved working with Dr Jack Powels on building a portable Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectrometer to measure the Earth’s magnetic field.  This project led Mansfield to the opportunity to study solid polymer systems using the NMR technique.  In 1962 Mansfield completed his PhD, presenting a thesis titled ‘Proton magnetic resonance relaxation in solids by transient methods’.

Mansfield continued his work on NMR and following a short period working in the US as a postdoctoral researcher he returned to the UK to work at Nottingham University.  Mansfield shared the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physiology/Medicine with Paul Lauterbur, awarded “for their discoveries concerning magnetic resonance imaging”.

You can learn more about Peter Mansfield’s achievements on the Nobel Prize website at: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2003/mansfield/facts/.