Felix Bloch

Felix Bloch was born in Switzerland on 23 October 1905 and trained as a theoretical physicist, making his name with fundamental work on ferromagnetism and the behavior of electrons in crystal lattices. In 1952 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Edward Mills Purcell for developing new methods for nuclear magnetic precision measurements — the early framework of nuclear magnetic resonance. He was Stanford's first Nobel laureate. The techniques he pioneered would eventually underpin medical imaging technology used worldwide. He died on 10 September 1983.