NMR Faculty and Professional Staff

Without skilled scientists, engineers, and technicians we would not be able to open the doors to the Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy and Imaging Program. The excellent team described here corresponds, interacts, and collaborates with researchers over a remarkable range of disciplines. Our research faculty are frequently invited to speak at national and international conferences and are also invited as visiting scientists to other international high field facilities. Our engineers collaborate with the NMR vendors, transferring technology and advancing capabilities. In addition, they develop unique hardware for the home research laboratories of our collaborators extending the impact of our program beyond the bounds of the Magnet Lab's sites. In Tallahassee, the team works to provide many unique capabilities on our high field magnets including the ultra-wide bore 900, but we are also working hard on future systems, such as the recently funded construction phase of the 36 T Series Connected Hybrid. Even further into the future we hope to be developing capabilities for a 30 T high homogeneity superconducting magnet system. This team would be pleased to hear from any and all potential users.
  — Tim Cross, Program Director

Ashley Blue began working at the NHMFL in 1993 with the DC Facility as a Taylor Technical Institute CO-OP student. While in technical school, he studied electronics and instrumentation. Later he joined the NMR program as a technical/user support staff member. During this time he gained many years of experience in the maintenance of NMR superconducting magnet systems, including prototype pumped systems from Oxford and Magnex. He also completed his bachelor's degree from Florida State University. His current responsibilities include 900 MHz system operator/administrator and overall NMR cryogenic and user support.

William W. Brey came to the NHMFL in 1999. Prior to joining the NMR group, Brey had primary responsibility for RF coil design for the Conductus/Varian team that developed the superconductive NMR spectroscopy probe. His graduate work with Thomas Mareci and Raymond Andrew at the University of Florida included the development of new designs for gradient coils. Before his graduate study, Brey worked on the research staff at the University of Texas Health Sciences Center, Houston, where he developed pulse sequences, gradient, and RF hardware for MRI and MR spectroscopy. He also worked as a consulting engineer for Tecmag, Inc., which produces retrofit hardware upgrades for NMR spectrometers. At the NHMFL Brey has continued his work with superconductive probes, guided the commissioning of the 900 MHz ultra-wide bore magnet, and is now developing probes and related technology for NMR on the Series Connected Hybrid magnet that is under development.

Richard Desilets operates the NMR/EMR machine shop where probes, cavities, and related instrumentation are fabricated. Many NMR and EMR users know him because of the last-minute support he provides to repair or adjust their instrumentation. Many others have used probes that benefited from his first-rate fabrication skills. His projects have included the Low-E probes for NMR of membrane proteins, the set of narrow bore magic angle probes for materials NMR, and the sub-mm EMR facility. Desilets came to the NHMFL in 2001 with considerable experience in industrial machine shops serving the oil and defense industries, including PGI International and Crane Defense Systems (now Crane Co).

Riqiang Fu earned his Ph.D. from Wuhan Institute of Physics, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, P. R. China, and received a President Award of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1992. He worked with Geoffrey Bodenhausen as a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, and joined the NHMFL when Bodenhausen's group was moved to Tallahassee in 1994. He has continued working at the NHMFL as a faculty member since 1998. He is currently serving as a chair of the 900 MHz Internal Science Review Committee to oversee scientific research activities on this unique spectrometer. His interests are in NMR, including development of solid state NMR techniques and solid state NMR applications to biological chemistry and materials science. Over the years he has developed many new NMR methodologies suitable for NMR applications at high fields, such as a broadband decoupling sequence (earned a U.S. patent in 1995), frequency modulated cross polarization for sensitivity enhancements in static and rotating solids, simultaneous frequency and amplitude modulation for heteronuclear distance measurements at high fields, quantitative cross polarization, and so on. His current research interests focus on methodology development for aligned membrane proteins, ¹⁹F solid state NMR applications in membrane proteins and polymers, and NMR studies in battery materials and fuel cells.

Zhehong Gan graduated in 1984 from Zhejiang University in China and received his Ph.D. in chemical physics from the University of Utah in 1990. After several years of managing solid state NMR and EPR instrumentation at the School of Chemical Science of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, he joined Richard Ernst's group in 1994 at the ETH in Switzerland conducting research in solid state NMR. Since joining the NHMFL in 1998, his research interest has been high field NMR, solid state NMR of quadrupolar nuclei, applications in biological and material chemistry. He has invented magic-angle turning (MAT), satellite-transition magic-angle spinning (STMAS) and more recently indirect detected ¹⁴N NMR in solids. He also collaborates with numerous groups in North America and Europe using the high field NMR facility at the NHMFL.

Peter Gor'kov came to NHMFL in 1999 from the group of Paul Lauterbur at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign where he designed MRI probes for small animal MRI. At the NHMFL, Gor'kov has designed and built over 25 user probes and accessories for solid state NMR in superconducting and resistive magnets, including RF probes for the 900 MHz UWB magnet. While other labs have acquired high field NMR magnets, the strength of the Magnet Lab's NMR program rests in large part on providing users with unique RF probes that are not available elsewhere. Peter's recent interests focus on developing instrumentation for NMR of biological solids to aid with solving structure of insoluble proteins in a native environment. Gor'kov has come up with several user RF probes that use specially designed low-E resonators instead of conventional solenoids to minimize the high-frequency electric fields that heat protein samples. This allows users to perform sensitive biological NMR experiments in the high field 900 MHz magnet. Several such probes were built for use at other facilities, including Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and Karlsuhe Institute of Technology.

Victor D. Schepkin received his Ph.D. from Kazan State University in Russia — the place where magnetic resonance was first discovered in condensed matter by Zavoisky in 1944. Schepkin's Ph.D. was devoted to the indirect detection of weak sodium MR signals found in solids in the form of impurities or within the neighborhood of impurities. Schepkin's MR imaging experience in the United States includes research at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in the laboratory of Nobel Laureate Paul Lauterbur at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and at the University of Michigan Medical School, department of radiology. His current research interest is in the biomedical arena: MR imaging of apoptosis and developing MR biomarkers for cancer therapy using sodium and proton diffusion MRI. In vivo imaging and spectroscopy at 21 T with the 105 mm bore available at the NHMFL opens new horizons for biomedical research. This extraordinary and unique research instrument offers the highest achievable resolution for anatomical MR imaging as well as the highest resolution functional MRI using other nuclei present in vivo such as sodium, carbon, potassium, chlorine, and other elements.

Kiran Shetty has been part of the instrument development group at the Magnet Lab since 2003. He graduated from Florida State University with a master's degree in electrical engineering in 2003. His graduate work with Frank Gross included developing an algorithm for uplink interference suppression in a Spatial Division Multiple Access (SDMA) based mobile cellular system using wireless adaptive array (Smart Antennas) techniques. Shetty joined the NHMFL in time to play a key role in the 900 MHz commissioning phase. He was involved in a number of engineering projects as well as field mapping and analysis, initial user support, and system testing. He is now involved in the testing and implementation of a flux stabilization system to minimize temporal fluctuation in the Series Connected Hybrid under development. In addition to providing user support for NMR experiments in high field magnets he also builds NMR RF probes for different applications.

Fengli Zhang received his Ph.D. in biophysics from Beijing Medical University. He worked at the University of Kansas, Boston University, and Clark University before he joined NHMFL in 2005. His main responsibility at the laboratory is to manage the solution NMR program. He also collaborates with Rafael Brüschweiler's group to carry out research projects. His research interests include developing covariance NMR methods and applying them to various NMR areas, such as high resolution NMR protein assignments and structure determinations, studying correlated protein motions by NMR relaxation, and molecular dynamics simulations.