LITMIR.BIZ

Foreword

This book is the fourth in the Wiley-VCH series on Magnetic Resonance Microscopy, a series linked in spirit to the International Conference on Magnetic Resonance Microscopy (ICMRM). Winfried Kuhn and Bernhard Blümich organized the first meeting of this biannual conference in 1991 in Heidelberg, which led to the first book in this series. That Heidelberg meeting is also when Paul Callaghan burst upon the scene (with his student Yang Xia, who remains active in these meetings) with his new, but now classic, book Principles of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Microscopy (Oxford University Press) – what timing! The wider appearance of magnetic gradient fields in the portfolio of magnetic resonance methods for imaging and studies of molecular transport phenomena was an exciting prospect. It motivated the still ongoing ICMRM conference series and the associated books, which summarize the progress in this field with chapters written by leading experts, among them Nobel Prize awardees Paul Lauterbur and Sir Peter Mansfield as well as Sir Paul Callaghan, who shaped that community like a force of nature from then on until his untimely death in 2012. Also, our brilliant colleague Robert Blinc from Slovenia attended the first ICMRM but had to leave early following an announcement during one of the sessions effectively saying “Professor Blinc, you are needed back in your country,” at which Robert Blinc stood up and left to facilitate the independence of Slovenia from Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. We were witnessing the birth of a country, a unique experience for most of us. At the third meeting in Würzburg, the brave suggestion to hold a meeting in North America was accepted. Thus, the fourth meeting was in Albuquerque and ICMRM has now a truly international presence, having ventured as far away as Utsunomiya and Beijing. These meetings, originally dubbed the Heidelberg Meetings, have been at the forefront of amazing developments and accompanying applications of magnetic resonance. Despite the inclusion of the word microscopy in their name, they represent the much broader area of magnetic resonance with spatial resolution, which is expressed by the title of the second book from the Albuquerque meeting, Spatially Resolved Magnetic Resonance, as well as the organizing Division of Spatially Resolved Magnetic Resonance of the AMPERE Society. Thanks to the advances over three decades, we have micrometer spatial resolution in magnetic resonance imaging today, while in the early days the word microscopy was understood as a tool to see things hard to visualize just by eye. We believe the broad range of the science and applications of magnetic resonance represented in these meetings is unique to all science and the field displays no hint of imminent stagnation – welcome news to all of us. I would like to close this Foreword with the observation that Bernhard Blümich, who with Winfried Kuhn founded these meetings 30 years ago, is still actively involved here as one of the editors of this book. I salute him for his continued contributions to the field and support of this conference.

      Eiichi Fukushima

      Albuquerque, 2021