Award for INM-4 Excellent Young Scientist
24 August 2021
INM-4 is proud to announce that Dr. Markus Zimmermann has been awarded the Forschungszentrum Jülich Excellence Prize 2021.
Dr. Zimmermann received the award along with chemist Dr. Florian D. Speck from IEK-11, and the prize, which is endowed with 5000 Euros each, was presented to the winners by the Chairman of the Board of Directors, Prof. Wolfgang Marquardt.
The award was given in recognition of Dr. Zimmermann’s excellent thesis and his work on reducing scanning time and improving precision in the field of quantitative MRI.
Quantitative magnetic resonance imaging (qMRI) is a relatively new variant of MRI examination that offers significantly better reproducibility and the sensitivity required for the early detection of diseases such as multiple sclerosis or damage to the white matter of the central nervous system.
Although qMRI can be used on clinical MRI machines without any technical changes, until now, the required measurement time was too long to make this method suitable for everyday use in hospitals. The reason for this is that the individual "image layers" are scanned several times, giving more detailed information, but at the expense of time. In response to this problem, Dr Zimmermann investigated novel acquisition and reconstruction techniques to shorten the required measurement time in qMRI. With his research, he has made a significant contribution to bringing this advanced measurement technique into everyday clinical use.
Now a postdoctoral researcher at INM-4, Dr. Zimmermann is deepening his research on fast qMRI. To this end, he is further developing the recording and reconstruction techniques developed in his doctoral thesis in order to record additional properties of body tissue while keeping the measurement time short and at the same time increasing the resolution of the images.
In addition to his prize-winning success, Dr. Zimmermann successfully applied for a project within the framework of the Young Scientists Academy for Medical Technology organised by the DFG and is currently leading the DFG-funded study "Development of a novel image acquisition and model-based reconstruction method for fast, accurate and robust multiparametric quantitative MRI at ultra-high field strength".
The Forschungszentrum Jülich has been awarding the Excellence Prize since 2009 to young, internationally successful scientists primarily based in Jülich for an outstanding dissertation and corresponding post-doctoral achievements. In a speech given at the presentation, Prof. Marquardt expressed his hope that the Excellence Award will have a motivating and inspiring effect and that Jülich will continue to have high performing young researchers in the years to come.