Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

New instrumental methods of 'seeing' have always led to an increased knowledge and understanding of nature. It was true in the sixteenth century when Galileo's optical telescope revolutionized astronomy. It is still true in the twenty-first century. The Scanning Tunneling Microscope, invented in the early 1980s, has completely changed our knowledge and understanding of surfaces. X-ray Radiography and the Electron Microscope, to give but two more examples, have each entered common scientific practice, and have led to a host of new clinical and industrial analyses. New processes and products soon follow when new knowledge is acquired. Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is probably the most flexible and powerful diagnostic imaging technique available to clinical medicine. Its invention in the early 1970s has generated a multi-billion dollar a year industry and permitted unparalleled and detailed diagnosis of a variety of human ailments. Nevertheless, traditional MRI techniques are unable to visualize a large variety of non-liquid materials such as porous and microporous solids, polymers, thin films, and gases. These systems are all of technological and scientific importance. The UNB MRI Centre has invented, and continues to invent, new MRI methods which solve many of the outstanding technical problems in materials science MRI. The imaging techniques under development at UNB permit unrivalled and unprecedented visualization and quantification of a very large range of physico-chemical systems. This NSERC Discovery grant supports ongoing research into new MRI imaging techniques, and their applications to chemical and material sciences.