JEENER

Laureate

Professor Jean Jeener

Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium

The single contribution selected for the award is the lecture at the Ampere Summer School in Basko Polje, Yugoslavia, September 1971, where J. Jeener introduced two-dimensional NMR. The unpublished lecture notes were later published in “NMR and More in Honour of Anatole Abragam”, Eds. M. Goldman and M. Porneuf, Les editions de physique, Avenue du Hoggar, Zone Industrielle de Courtaboeuf, BP 112, F-91944 Les Ulis cedex A, France (1994).

This seminal paper has shown an unprecedented impact on the development of state-of-the-art NMR spectroscopy. In principle, any multiple-dimensional NMR experiment introduced so far relies on the method proposed by Jean Jeener. Countless examples can be found in both liquid-state and solid-state NMR, as well as in NMR imaging applications in medicine, biology and material science.

Jean (Louis, Charles) JEENER (born on 31 July 1931) received a degree in physics and chemistry at Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB). To obtain PhD, he worked with I. Prigogine at ULB from 1953 till 1958. Next two years he spent as a postdoc with N. Bloembergen at Harvard. In October 1960, he became a professor at ULB where he established an NMR lab, which is still actively involved in research, and taught a wide variety of courses. Since 1996 he is Professor Emeritus at ULB.

His research interest in NMR started with spin thermodynamics and dynamics in solids, progressively extending towards 2D spectroscopy in liquids, superoperators, peak shapes in the presence of molecular rearrangements, formulation of pulse spectroscopy with full quantization of the field, and, since 1990, radiation damping and dipolar field effects in liquids (electronic control of radiation damping, issues of principle in the theory, dynamical stability).