Peter Mansfield

Sir Peter Mansfield was an English physicist, born in Lambeth, London, on 9 October 1933, who shared the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Paul Lauterbur for discoveries concerning magnetic resonance imaging. He left school at fifteen to work as a printer's assistant, took a job with the Rocket Propulsion Department of the Ministry of Supply, and after national service studied for A-levels at night school before reading physics at Queen Mary College, University of London, where he graduated in 1959 and took his PhD in 1962 on nuclear magnetic resonance relaxation in solids. After a postdoctoral year with Charlie Slichter at the University of Illinois he returned in 1964 to the University of Nottingham, where he became professor of physics in 1979 and stayed until his retirement in 1994. His team there developed the MRI equipment with Medical Research Council grants. He is credited with slice selection, with the mathematical analysis that turns the radio signals into an image, and with echo-planar imaging, which made fast imaging and functional MRI feasible. In 1978 he tested the first full body prototype on himself and produced the first scan of a live patient. He died in Nottingham on 8 February 2017.