Biography of William A. Edelstein, Ph.D.

William Edelstein received a B.S. in Physics from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign in 1965 and a Ph.D. in the same subject from Harvard University in 1974 with a thesis on nuclear physics. Bill then had a three-year Research Fellowship (postdoctoral) at Glasgow University in Scotland (looking for gravitational waves) followed by another Research Fellowship at Aberdeen University with a pioneering effort to develop MRI.

At Aberdeen he was the primary inventor of the "Spin Warp" imaging technique which is still used in all commercial MRI systems. He joined GE CRD (Corporate Research and Development) in Schenectady, NY in 1980 as part of a research team to help GE Medical Systems (GEMS) develop and commercialize MRI. The GE MRI business began in 1981 and grew to over $1 billion per year in the early 1990s. Bill has contributed to many areas of MRI, including pulse sequence optimization, RF coil and gradient coil design, MRI electronics, high field imaging and acoustic noise reduction in MRI systems. In November, 2001 he retired from GE and continued work on MRI as an independent scientist and consultant via his company MRScience LLC. During that time he was also a Visiting Scientist at Rensselaer and a Senior Research Associate at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. In February, 2007 he joined the MRI Division of the Johns Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore as Visiting Distinguished Professor of Radiology. 

For his work on MRI Bill received the Gold Medal Prize from the International Society of Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM) in 1990 and a Coolidge Fellowship from GE CRD in 1991. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, a Fellow of the Institute of Physics (UK) and a Fellow of the ISMRM. In 2005 he was awarded the Industrial Applications of Physics Prize from the American Institute of Physics (http://www.aip.org/ca/edelstein.html). He received an honorary DSc from the University of Aberdeen, UK in July, 2007. 

Back