Competitions

Poster Competition

The posters of young scientists will be judged by a jury. The best presenters/posters will be announced and receive an award during the conference banquet.

How to compete:

If your abstract to the conference is accepted for a poster presentation, do your best to make it stand out of the crowd while showing strong and meaningful results and you will surely win the prize! Only PhD students and post-doc fellows can compete for this prize.

Image beauty competition

Yang Xia initiated an Image Beauty Contest in 2007. The first award was conducted inside the caves of Feestgrot, Valkenburg, the Netherlands.

We all have those moments in the lab where nothing seems to be working. We just get some odd-looking images from our experiments – full of artifacts – that is our jargon. If you have not yet had one of these moments, you have not pushed your machine hard enough. Or occasionally, we need to generate some pretty looking images, to be used to impress potential students or visitors. So, one way or another, we all have these images that we do not know what to do with them. This contest is your chance to display these images that otherwise would never leave your lab. Actually getting a nice-looking image is not easy. It needs a deep understanding of NMR imaging, both in theory and in practice. It needs an appreciation of art. It also needs the personal character of a perfectionist.

Since this is a beauty contest, beauty has to be the most important criteria. In our language, the SNR matters; the resolution matters; the image contrast matters; and artifact and distortion matters. Most of all, the overall artistic impression matters. In a way, if you think that your image is worth being framed and hanged on the wall of someone's living room, you have a wining entry.

For previous years winners and their beautiful images, follow the link..

How to compete:

Entries are made anonymously at the ICMRM conference.

Paul Callaghan Young Investigator Award

Sir Paul Terence Callaghan (19^th August 1947 – 24^th March 2012) was a New Zealand physicist and Fellow of the Royal Society who authored over 230 journal articles that present major advances in NMR methodologies for the study of molecular dynamics and molecular organization in complex fluids, soft matter and porous materials. He is most well known in the ICMRM community for his contributions in Rheo-NMR, diffusion of molecules in porous media, and development of NMR techniques that utilise the earth's magnetic field. As the founding director of the MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology at Victoria University of Wellington, he held the position of Alan MacDiarmid Professor of Physical Sciences.

He was also an outstanding and beloved mentor to young investigators in the ICMRM community. He was involved with the ICMRM conference through organization and participation from the very beginning in 1991 until his last attendance in China, 2011. He placed a high priority on attending the Young Investigator section at the meeting, and could be relied on to engage with all the finalists in the Young Investigator competition through thought provoking questions and follow-up discussion. In 2013, the Young Investigator Award was renamed the 'Paul Callaghan Young Investigator Award' in honour of his commitment to mentoring young investigators.

How to compete:

Young investigators (age < 35 years, no permanent position) are eligible to contribute papers for the Young Investigator competition. For more information about the format of the papers see our Abstract submission page. A jury will select up to five to present their work in a plenary session. The best presentation receives the "Paul-Callaghan-Award" during the conference banquet.

Erwin Hahn Lecturer Award

Erwin Louis Hahn (9th June 1921 – 20th September 2016) was an American physicist and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences who authored many groundbreaking articles that present major advances in magnetic resonance and optics. He is most well known in the Science community for his contributions in time reversal phenomena, in nuclear quadrupole resonance and in nuclear magnetic resonance for the spin echoes and in optics for self-induced transparency. He was the first to perform pulsed Nuclear magnetic resonance and to record the first Free Induction Decay.  Prof. E. Hahn joined the Department of Physics at UC Berkeley as an Assistant Professor in 1955, becoming a full professor in 1961 and then an emeritus in 1991. Being Professor Emeritus at the University of California Berkeley he received in 2016 the Gold Medal from the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM), the Society’s highest honor, for his creation of pulsed magnetic resonance and processes of signal refocusing which are essential to, and the foundation of, modern day MRI and magnetic resonance.

He was an extremely passionate lover of physics, a brilliant mind and remained excited about the wonders of our physical world throughout his life. He was a beloved mentor to young students who benefited from his experience and presence in the laboratory. In 2019, the Erwin Hahn Lecturer Award will be given to a highly visible researcher to deliver a keynote speech at the ICMRM conference.