2011 Welch Award in Chemistry Recipients

	Dr. John S. Waugh Massachusetts Institute of Technology

"For ground-breaking research in the field of
nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy"

Many of the past half century's discoveries in chemistry, physics, biology and materials science flow in part from John S. Waugh's pioneering work in nuclear magnetic resonance.  His theoretical and experimental breakthroughs revolutionized the field of NMR spectroscopy, one of science's most powerful and widely used research tools.

Dr. Waugh and his students discovered and developed the fundamental methods that extended the application of high resolution NMR to solids.  In 1968 they demonstrated experimentally how to eliminate the dipolar coupling masking the small chemical shifts that NMR measures, thus enabling scientists to use the technique to determine the structure of solid materials.  His team followed this discovery with a theoretical explanation of it known as the Average Hamiltonian Theory.  Today this method is used in both solid and liquid NMR experiments.

In 1973, Dr. Waugh's group solved another major problem limiting NMR aplications with a cross polarization/decoupling method that greatly increased the detectability of rare nuclei, such as carbon-13.  They also carried out the first detailed theoretical analysis of magic-angle spinning (MAS).  Dr. Waugh also developed the first comprehensive theory of heternuclear decoupling in liquid state NMR.  All of these advances greatly aided researchers in determining the molecular structures of proteins, nucleic acids and drugs.

Subsequently the Waugh group turned its attention to the enormous increase in sensitivity that can be obtained by doing NMR at ultra-low temperatures of the order of 0.01 Kelvin.

Dr. Waugh earned an undergraduate degree in chemistry from Dartmouth and his Ph.D. at the California Institute of Technology.  It was at Caltech where he first became intrigued with NMR, then a very new field.  He built his first spectrometer there and used it to solve a chemical question for his doctorate, one of the first problems solved using NMR.  He presented those results at one of the first NMR symposia in the early 1950s.  He joined the MIT faculty as an instructor in 1953, becoming the A.A. Noyes Professor in 1973 and an MIT Institute Professor in 1988.  He retired from MIT in 1997, but maintains an office there and pursues his interest in exploring fundamental physical questions via computer.