MRI pioneer, Nobel Laureate, and physics alumnus Sir Peter Mansfield passes

The New York Times (Feb. 11) – Sir Peter Mansfield, who shared a Nobel Prize for discoveries that underpinned the invention of magnetic resonance imaging, the method of peering inside the human body that revolutionized medicine, died on Wednesday. He was 83. “It’s hugely important,” says Charles P. Slichter, a professor emeritus of physics at Illinois, of the discovery. “It’s such an all-pervasive technique.” Mansfield worked in Slichter’s laboratory as a postdoctoral researcher in the 1960s. Mansfield was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2003, along with Paul C. Lauterbur, a professor at Illinois. The two had worked independent of each other in studying magnetic resonance imaging.