Sir Peter Mansfield FRS[1][2] (9 October 1933 – 8 February 2017)[3] was an English physicist who was awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, shared with Paul Lauterbur, for discoveries concerning Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI).

During World War II he was evacuated from London, initially to Sevenoaks and then twice to Torquay, Devon, where he was able to stay with the same family on both occasions.

Having never heard of the exam before, and having no time to prepare, Mansfield failed to gain a place at the local Grammar school.

At the age of 18, having developed an interest in rocketry, Mansfield took up a job with the Rocket Propulsion Department of the Ministry of Supply in Westcott, Buckinghamshire.

His final-year project, supervised by Jack Powles, was to construct a portable, transistor-based spectrometer to measure the Earth's magnetic field.

Towards the end of this project Powles offered Mansfield a position in his NMR (Nuclear Magnetic Resonance) research group.

He received his PhD in 1962; his thesis was titled Proton magnetic resonance relaxation in solids by transient methods.

[10] Following his PhD, Mansfield was invited to postdoctoral research with Charlie Slichter at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, where he carried out an NMR study of doped metals.