The Rocky Mountain Conference on Magnetic Resonance will hold its Conference Banquet & Awards Ceremony on July 25, 2018 at Snowbird Resort & Conference Center, in Snowbird, Utah. The event will consist of dinner, a feature presentation, “A Half Century of RF, μw’s and the Magic Angle” by Robert Griffin of MIT, followed by an awards ceremony recognizing leaders and achievements in the EPR and Solid-state NMR communities.

In 1970, after completing his PhD thesis using EPR spectroscopy at Washington University, Robert Griffin moved to MIT and joined John Waugh’s research group with the goal of learning the recherché aspects of pulsed NMR. In those days WAHUHA and related pulse sequences were the vogue and led to the observation of the first ¹⁹F chemical shift tensors in solids. During this period he also observed the first high resolution ¹³C-¹⁴N, and later ¹³C-¹³C, dipolar couplings in single crystals, suggesting that it would be possible to obtain internuclear distances in a manner consistent with the goal of high resolution molecular structure elucidation. This idea together with magic angle spinning subsequently lead to methods to perform dipolar recoupling and the measurement of homo and heteronuclear distances in rotating solids. Today dipolar recoupling is used to determine atomic resolution structures of membrane and amyloid proteins, structures of surfaces, etc. Because all NMR experiments are demanding of sensitivity and because he grew up on microwaves, he also developed an interest in high field dynamic nuclear polarization (DNP) using millimeter wave sources as a means to perform electron-nuclear polarization transfers that enhance signal intensities. These methods initially employed CW oscillators, but in the past few years have transitioned to the time domain. Professor Griffin’s presentation will review some of these developments and address the question of where we go next.

The Rocky Mountain Conference is an exceptional opportunity for the EPR and Solid-state NMR communities to come together, and the banquet is a celebration of common interests in magnetic resonance.