In memory of Professor Dr. Raymond Andrew and to honour his pioneering work in the field of magnetic resonance, the Groupement AMPERE awards the Raymond Andrew Prize. The prize is given to young scientists for an outstanding PhD thesis in magnetic resonance.
The Raymond Andrew Prize 2023 is awarded to Dr. Nino Wili. He has worked on his Ph.D. thesis in the laboratory of Gunnar Jeschke at ETH Zürich. During this time, he established several new applications of tailored waveform excitation of electron spins to be used with dynamic nuclear polarization (DNP). Most noteworthy, Dr. Wili gained such deep understanding of the spin dynamics that he could invent a reverse DNP experiment which enables indirect detection of remote nuclear spins via the electron spin. He also observed longitudinal relaxation of nuclear spins that is by orders of magnitude slower than the one of the electron spins that are used as a polarization source and for detection.
Nino Wili studied Interdisciplinary Natural Sciences at ETH Zurich, with a research stay at the University of St Andrews. For his Master thesis, he worked with Prof. Matthias Ernst, investigating the influence of pulse transients on various experiments in ssNMR, both theoretically and experimentally. In 2017, he joined the group of Prof. Gunnar Jeschke for a PhD in pulse EPR method development. At the core of the research was a home-built pulse EPR spectrometer based on a fast arbitrary waveform generator (AWG). He developed methods for hyperfine spectroscopy, detecting nuclei close to unpaired electrons, and for electron-electron distance measurements. Finally, he also worked on pulsed DNP. In 2022, he joined the lab of Niels Chr. Nielsen (Aarhus University) as a Postdoc.