Welch Award recipient honored for revolutionizing
NMR spectroscopy

"I have had the special joy of helping pioneer an entirely new area of science and creating a
collection of tools and techniques that other researchers continue to extend and build upon."  --John S. Waugh

HOUSTON, Oct. 24, 2011 - John S. Waugh of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will be presented with the $300,000 Welch Award in Chemistry tonight at a black-tie dinner here to honor his contributions to basic research that benefits humankind.  Dr. Waugh's theoretical and experimental breakthroughs revolutionized the field of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, one of science's most powerful and widely used research tools.  Many of the past half century's discoveries in chemistry, physics, biology and materials science flow in part from his pioneering work.  The Houston-based Welch Foundation, one of the oldest and largest sources of private funding for basic research in chemistry, annually bestows the prestigious award.

"Dr. Waugh discovered how to use NMR to study solids, creating a collection of tools that allows researchers to view the structures and properties of proteins, membranes, viruses and many other critical components of life," said Ernest H. Cockrell, chair of The Welch Foundation.  "Ultimately, new applications in fields as diverse as medicine and batteries can trace their way back to the research techniques he initiated."

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.

"NMR spectroscopy, thanks to Dr. Waugh's insights, continues to profoundly influence the way we do science today," said James L. Kinsey, chair of The Welch Foundation's Scientific Advisory Board.  "He took what was a very useful tool for studying small molecules in solution, and greatly expanded its possible applications to a range of solid materials that can't be studied effectively by any other method.  His contributions have been absolutely fundamental to many past and current additions to our scientific understanding."

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.

"It is wonderful to be recognized by The Welch Foundation for doing what I love," Dr. Waugh said.  "When I started out in NMR so many years ago, little did I know that I would still be writing and thinking about it more than a half century later.  I have had the special joy of helping pioneer an entirely new area of science and creating a collection of tools and techniques that other researchers continue to extend and build upon.  I am pleased that my contributions continue to aid the work of scientists in so many fields as they add to our understanding of the world."

He has held extended visiting appointments at uiniversities and scientific institutes around the world; authored 200 papers and one book; received numerous awards, including the Wolf Prize in 1983; is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences; served as editor of Advances in Magnetic Resonance and associate editor of numerous journals; and served on advisory boards for the National Science Foundation, the Sloan Foundation, the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, and five universities including Tufts, Princeton, Case Western, California and South Carolina.

Dr. Waugh's wife Susan is a former hospital administrator and watercolor artist.  He has two children and five grandchildren.

The Welch Foundation advances science through research and departmental grants, funding of endowed chairs, an annual chemical conference and support for other chemistry-related programs.  In addition to the Welch Award, the Foundation annually estows the Norman Hackerman Award in Chemical Research to recognize the accomplishments of "rising star" chemical scientists in Texas.  Since its founding in 1954, Welch has contributed more than $684 million as part of its mission to support the basic chemical research that improves life.

For more information on the Foundation and a list of previous Welch Award recipients, please visit www.welch1.org .