Peter Mansfield


 * For the historian specialising in Arabs and the Middle East, see Peter Mansfield (historian).

Sir Peter Mansfield, FRS, (born 9 October 1933), is a British physicist who was awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discoveries concerning magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The Nobel Prize was shared with Paul Lauterbur, who also contributed to the development of MRI. Sir Peter is a professor at the University of Nottingham.

The Nobel Prize in Physics in 1952, which went to Felix Bloch and Edward Purcell, was for the development of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), the scientific principle behind MRI. For decades magnetic resonance was used mainly for studying the chemical structure of substances, and Mansfield's first project in this field was to develop a portable, transistorised Earth's field NMR (EFNMR) spectrometer in the late 1950s. It was not until the 1970s with Lauterbur's and Mansfield's developments that NMR could be used to produce images of the body. Mansfield is credited with showing how the radio signals from MRI can be mathematically analyzed, making interpretation of the signals into a useful image a possibility. He is also credited with discovering how fast imaging could be possible by developing the MRI protocol called echo-planar imaging. Echo-planar imaging allows T2* weighted images to be collected many times faster than previously possible. It also has made functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) feasible.

Mansfield came from humble beginnings in South East London, attending secondary school in Peckham. He left school at 15, and became a printer. He took A levels in night school. He then studied physics at Queen Mary College, London, graduating with a B.Sc. in 1959 and a Ph.D. in 1962.

He has worked in the Department of Physics at the University of Nottingham since 1964.