Richard R. Ernst was the 1991 recipient of the Nobel and Wolf Prizes in Chemistry and the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize at Columbia University, a joint award to Ernst and his colleague Kurt Wüthrich for their development of the methodology of high-resolution nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR)spectroscopy, the most important instrumental measuring technique within chemistry. Ernst's contributions in this field led to the development of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), the biomedical instrument widely used today to perform noninvasive diagnosis of the human body.

Born on August 14, 1933, to Robert Ernst and Irma Brunner in Winterthur, Switzerland, Richard Robert Ernst was educated at the Eidgenössiche Technische Hochschule (ETH) in Zurich, where he received his doctorate in 1962. In 1976 he became a full professor at the ETH. After receiving his Ph.D., Ernst moved to Palo Alto, California, to become a research scientist at Varian Associates. There he worked...