Gallery Archive
December 2002 Group Meeting
Every Tuesday morning, the Walsworth group meets to discuss, at great length, each member’s work over the previous week, as well as to debate the scintillating details of dealing with our administration. The following photos were snapped by our resident visitor, Mike Crescimanno, during December 2002, showing the meeting in full force.
Ron (center) leads the animated discussion, surrounded by (from left), Matt Rosen, Caspar van der Wal, Mason Klein and Marc Humphrey. Note the spacious surrounds, as we meet in our office ante-area, due to the penchant for higher forces to regularly remove us from our scheduled meeting room.
Marc sits next to the fax, and our most important piece of non-scientific equipment, the group espresso machine!
Group staff scientists, David Phillips and Ross Mair (left and center) have many years experience in surviving these meetings.
Most of the students group together in one corner – from center: Ruopeng Wang, Federico Cane and Leo Tsai. Matt Rosen (in foreground) always has something for show and tell – or maybe its an MP3 player.
Walsworth Group: Hard at Work
The NMR-research side of the group is inherently multi-disciplinary and multi-institutional. As we have not, until December 2003, had space to locate our own NMR/MRI instrumentation at the Center for Astrophysics, we’ve trekked across Boston and further afield in search of collaborators who are willing to participate in laser-polarized noble-gas NMR research projects utilizing their NMR equipment. In Boston, we’ve worked at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH), Massachusetts General Hospital, and MIT; while our travels have reached as far afield as University of New Hampshire in Durham, and Schlumberger-Doll Research, in Ridgefield, CT.
We’re now rationalizing our space (and travel!) and will be erecting our own high field vertical bore NMR system and ultra-low-field open-access human MRI system in our own lab space at 60 Garden St. Collaborations are continuing with BWH and MIT, however, so we’re still likely to see more scenes of noble-gas polarization equipment hitting the road, leaving the CfA for BWH or MIT, and even University of Massachusetts Amherst in the future. At left, Matt Rosen is at the wheel of a rental truck, on I-95 on a mission to University of New Hampshire. At right, Leo Tsai, John Ng and Mason Klein are figuring out how to get a 3He polarizer out of the truck.
The prototype open-access very-low field human MRI system was built at University of New Hampshire. Although this collaboration has now ended, the construction of the prototype system and initial images acquired were a guiding process in the design and construction of the optimized second generation system now being built at the CfA. Leo demonstrated the vertical oreintation imaging position with the RF coils in place near his chest (left), while at right Leo and John are accurately adjusting the placement of a phantom sample in the imager.
Ross was usually found sitting at the host computer of the console (left), with the highly modified commercial gradient power amplifier and RF monitoring rack behind him. (The second generation system will be much more compact, featuring a commercial RF control console designed to work at 100 – 300 kHz, and a modern Windows-XP interface on the host!). Despite the hardware, we generated some impressive results, which usually bought a crowd gathering around the offline image-processing computer (right).
Matt and Leo had built the 3He polarizer for this project, and Matt was often seen tending his “baby”. This polarizer has since been relocated to BWH for a collaborative project involving high-field human MRI. The one drawback of 3He polarization by spin-exchange is the long pump-up time, which did give us the chance to make regular trips to the UNH Diary Bar, for the best ice-cream north of Boston.
The 3He inhalation project is just getting underway at BWH in December 2003. In this location, we get to work in the salubrious hospital environment, although in more cramped space. These photos are taken at the 1.5 T human scanner located down the corridor from our collaborators’ lab-sapce in a building adjoining BWH. At left, Matt shows he can also drive the General Electric Medical Systems human scanner console, while at right, Matt, Sam Patz (our BWH host) and Tina Pavlin debate the value of the 3He gyromagnetic ratio.
Our collaborators at BWH are Sam Patz, and his colleague, independent contractor Mirko Hrovat, an electronics expert who’s company is providing most of the RF coil design experience for this project. Ross managed to squeeze into their electronics workshop space with them at BWH when they were working on a coil designs.
Meanwhile, back at the CFA, the dual-noble-gas maser team are hard at work in the small climate-controlled lab that houses the dual-noble-gas maser. Ron (left), David Phillips and Matt (right) are advising Federico Cane (front) about the use of the two-species129Xe/3He Zeeman maser for tests of Lorentz symmetry (both rotations and boosts) for the neutron. Actually, they look like they’re posing for the camera, but you get the idea!
Walsworth Group Roadtrips!
We work hard in the lab and our offices, but occasionally Ron lets us out and we hit the road. This may sound like fun, but its hard work all the way. Our US Government Travel Department rules ensure we stay in the cushiest Super8 and Best Western hotels, and they strictly forbid having fun in a rental car.
In 2001, Ross was invited to talk at the International Conference on Magnetic Resonance Microscopy in Nottingham, England. Although not focused solely on studies of Porous Media, this conference nonetheless featured its fair share of this subject. Conference organizers found me working hard studying sandstone, as I made my way down one of Robin Hood’s escape tunnels from Nottingham Castle.
In February 2002, after much arm twisting, I was forced to attend the Australian/New Zealand MR meeting, being held on the glorious shores of Lake Taupo (left) in central New Zealand. Being February, we caught the one sunny month of the year in NZ right in the heart of a Boston winter. Being Australian, I knew only too well of the need for sunblock. During one of the (very short) breaks from intensive lectures, I was forced to remind the unhappy British attendees, each side of me, of its importance.
Despite the hard work, these conferences always seem to involve eating and drinking, and sometimes, we wind up in some of the strangest places. At a Porous Media NMR conference held in Ulm, Germany in September 2002, we wound up having dinner in an underground castle ballroom on the shores of Lake Geneva, with Switzerland in the distance. I was explaining something to Siegfried Stapf from RWTH in Aachen, Germany.
About the same time, Ron was also in Germany, at the Helion02 conference in polarized 3He targets and their applications. Despite a heavy lecture load, the physicists were let out briefly for an enjoyable, if chilly, boat ride along the Rhine river. Ron seemed to be enjoying the views and the conversation, if not the weather!
Oops – here we are eating/drinking again. In the left picture, Ross is teaching Matt Rosen (left) and Ruopeng Wang (right) of the dangers of a pitcher of a Budweiser, and in the right photo, is catching up with old friends Melanie and Miki while the sun sets on Savannah, Georgia, in the background.
The 2003 International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine conference was held in Toronto, Canada, and despite being July, it rained for most of the week, except for Sunday. On that day, our isotopically enriched gas supplier, Spectra Gases, held an important seminar on noble gas supplies in a skybox at the Toronto Skydome, home of the BlueJays. I was engaged in extended discussion with Spectra’s UK representative (about the differences between cricket and baseball) (right), while the whole group of us – Leo Tsai, Mirko Hrovat (collaborater from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and an unknown rabid Blue Jays fan from north of Boston, and myself held a heated discussion over pretzels.
Purely co-incidentally, there was baseball taking place. And needless to say, as on most days, the Yankees won
Oops – here we are eating/drinking yet again! In the left picture, David Phillips and Ron are teaching Mason Klein and Christine Wang the joys of dark beer at the DAMOP conference in Tuscon, in May of 2004. At right, Ron demonstrates his love of the native cactii, perhaps after too much of the dark beer!
Just in case you get the wrong impression that little work is done on these road trips, here is a picture of Ron in presentation mode at the Helion conference in Germany in 2002, and Ross listening attentively at the New Mexico Regional NMR meeting in Utah, 2002.
The work photos are far less interesting, unfortunately!