Richard Ernst

Born on 14 August 1933 in Winterthur, Switzerland, Richard Ernst is a Nobel Prize–winning physical chemist. Ernst attended ETH Zürich, where he earned his undergraduate degree in chemical engineering in 1956 and PhD in physical chemistry in 1962. His doctoral thesis centered on the newly developing field of high-resolution nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). The following year he left Switzerland for the US to become a research scientist at Varian Associates in Palo Alto, California. There, he and a colleague worked to improve the sensitivity of NMR spectroscopy and developed Fourier transform NMR. In 1968 Ernst returned to Switzerland to join the faculty of ETH Zürich, where he would remain for the rest of his career. In the 1970s he developed two-dimensional NMR techniques to study large molecules. He also expanded the application of NMR spectroscopy as a valuable tool in a number of fields besides chemistry, including physics, biology, and medicine. His work would lead to the development of magnetic resonance imaging, a noninvasive diagnostic imaging technology essential to medical professionals. For his work on high-resolution NMR, Ernst was awarded the 1991 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. His other honors include the Wolf Prize in Chemistry (1991), the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize (1991), and the Marcel Benoist Prize (1985). He served as president of the Research Council of ETH Zürich and was a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and the UK’s Royal Society, among others. Ernst retired as professor emeritus in 1998. (Photo credit: AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Physics Today Collection)

Date in History: 14 August 1933