Carnegie Mellon 2013 Pittsburgh Conference Lecture

Pittsburgh Conference Lectures

Biography

CMU professor emeritus Josef Dadok will present his colorful career in scientific instrumentation that he started in 1948 as a student at the Technical University in Brno, Czechoslovakia. His early theoretical and practical experience in the radiofrequency techniques led him to propose research and development of the instrumentation for the rf. spectroscopy in 1953. After a short time spent on building a microwave spectrometer for 1.25 cm wavelength at the Institute for Scientific Instruments, he switched to NMR, a field that he emphasized for the remainder of his professional life. His major achievements in this field can be described as follows:

1. He and a group of collaborators contributed substantially to the application of NMR spectroscopy in Czechoslovakia by developing a series of High Resolution NMR Spectrometers for frequencies 30 MHz, 40 MHz, 60 MHz and 80 MHz and delivering them to major academic institutions, such as the Institute for Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry in Prague.
2. He transferred the knowhow in this field to the industrial enterprise Tesla Brno, that had manufactured more than 500 High Resolution NMR Spectrometers and for research and industrial institutions in many countries behind the iron curtain by 1991.
3. He began a collaboration with Aksel A. Bothner-By at Carnegie Mellon University in the fall of 1967, leading to the development of two high field, high resolution NMR spectrometers 250 MHz and 600 MHz (1978), with superconducting magnets built by Westinghouse and Intermagnetics General Corporation. Both spectrometers served as workhorse instruments in the NIH National NMR center at the Mellon Institute and produced scientific data for hundreds of publications by the visiting users of the facility.
4. In 1972 he proposed Rapid Scan Correlation NMR, a new technique for accumulation of NMR data. This technique offers advantages in a number of special NMR and EPR experiments, and recently it was successfully used by a group at the University of Minnesota for MRI of media with short relaxation times (SWIFT). A commercial version is presently being developed by GE.

Sponsored by:

PittCon, SSP, SACP and Carnegie Mellon

Photo taken in 2013 at the ceremonial inauguration of the Josef Dadok National NMR Centre. Central European Institute of Technology. Brno, Czech Republic.

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