| Admin History | Edward Raymond Andrew was born in Boston, Lincolnshire in 1921 and was educated at Wellingborough School. He graduated from Christ's College, Cambridge during the Second World War, then undertook wartime service as a Scientific Officer at the Telecommunications Research Establishment (later the Royal Radar Establishment) in Malvern, Worcestershire, studying the attenuation of microwave radar signals through gun flashes. After the war he returned to Cambridge where he completed a doctorate. In 1948 he received a Commonwealth Fund Fellowship to spend a postdoctoral year at Harvard University, one of the pioneering institutions for nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR), in the laboratory of Professor Edward Purcell. He became one of the first practitioners of NMR in the UK when in 1949 he took up a lectureship at the University of St Andrews. He was appointed Professor of Physics at the University College of North Wales, Bangor, in 1954 and, in the following year, published the first textbook on NMR. Whilst at Bangor in 1958, Andrew discovered the technique of 'magic angle spinning' for appraising solids with NMR. This technique involved rapidly spinning samples at an angle to a magnetic field, and became the foundation of modern high resolution NMR studies for chemical structures.
In 1964, Andrew was appointed Lancashire-Spencer Professor and Head of the Physics Department at the University of Nottingham. He continued his work on using rapid rotation of samples for high resolution studies, and also carried out research into how NMR could form the basis of a medical imaging technique which was later named magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). He established Nottingham as a centre for research into MRI, and his research group was one of the first to obtain detailed MRI images of the human wrist and brain. He was also Dean of the Faculty of Science from 1975 to 1978.
In 1983, Andrew left Nottingham and became Graduate Research Professor at the University of Florida, Gainesville. He continued his NMR and MRI research, and played a role in establishing the US National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee. He retired in 1999.
Andrew held the presidency of the Ampere Group 1974-1980, the International Society of Magnetic Resonance 1984-1987, and the British Radiofrequency Spectroscopy Group, of which he was the founder chairman, 1956-1959. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1984. He died on 27 May 2001. |
| Custodial History | The collection was given to the University of Nottingham's Department of Manuscripts and Special Collections in 2002, with further material received in 2008. This catalogue was enhanced, and the collection was repackaged, in 2018-2019 with support from a Wellcome Trust Research Resources Award. |
| Description | The collection consist of the following series:
Publications (PRA/1)
Biographical material (PRA/2)
Telecommunications Research Establishment (PRA/3)
University of Cambridge (PRA/4)
University of Nottingham (PRA/5)
University of Florida (PRA/6)
Research papers (PRA/7)
Societies and Organisations (PRA/8)
Lectures (PRA/9)
Visits and Conferences (PRA/10)
Correspondence (PRA/11)
Non-textual Media (PRA/12)
Andrew's publications and research papers together form the largest part of the collection. They include research notes, experimental results and photographs relating to MRI, NMR and magic angle spinning (the technique which he pioneered), copies of his own published papers, and drafts of such papers. There is also a substantial amount of correspondence, which he exchanged with scientists around the world for more than half a century.
Other main areas of the collection include papers relating to conferences he attended and lectures he gave (generally including meeting programmes and his lecture notes), papers from his time at the University of Florida, and material relating to his membership of scientific societies.
Also present are around 750 35 mm slides showing graphs and diagrams relating to magic angle spinning and MRI. |