Hello!

I'm currently a senior engineer in a startup company called Hyperfine Research, in Guilford, Connecticut, USA. We make portable MRI that comes to the patient, check it out on our website.

I have a PhD in Physics. I accomplished this work under the supervision of Dimitris Sakellariou at CEA (french atomic commission). My main focus was on the design and fabrication of permanent magnets and hardware for portable Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR). You can check out the web site of the Sakellariou's group to get an idea of what is done there. My thesis details various theoretical aspects of the design of permanent magnets for NMR and describes the fabrication and testing of a single-sided magnet with a highly controlled field profile (see here to download the thesis).

After my PhD, I have been a post-doc for one year at the École Normale Supérieure de Paris, from where I collaborated with my former lab and continued my work on permanent magnets and portable NMR. During that time, we performed the first NMR experiment in a rotating permanent magnet generating a field at the magic angle with its axis. This first experiment is a proof of concept for a project of rotating magnet system for small animal imaging combined with localized spectroscopy. The point of the rotating field is to average out susceptibility broadening and enhance spectral resolution in live tissues, potentially removing the need for biopsy in metabolism studies. Another accomplishment was the fabrication of a strong magnet I had designed during my PhD. This magnet generates about 0.9 T field strength, provides high spectral resolution (<1ppm) over a 5mm NMR tube, and can be used with standard narrow-bore NMR probes.

I've then been a magnet engineer in the magnetic resonance R&D team at Oxford Instruments (UK), for about 2 years. I worked on all electromagnetic-related aspects of the design and fabrication of benchtop NMR instruments. This includes the main magnet, the gradient coils, the shim system, environmental interferences, stability, etc. Most of my work was related to the development of Pulsar, a compact benchtop NMR spectrometer, launched while I was there. Check out this nice piece of kit here. Following the launch of Pulsar, I moved on to work for Tesla Engineering, as a development scientist. There, I designed gradient coils for clinical MRI scanners. I developed design codes from scratch using stream functions and local bases to give maximum design flexibility, integrating constraints such as force balancing, arbitrary field profile, etc. I also developed a user-friendly GUI to make the gradient design software accessible to non-experts. I did all of this using Fortran, Python and Qt. I was also involved in particle accelerator measurements, for which I developed a rotating coil harmonic measurement and analysis system.

I'm also an optics engineer graduated from Supoptique (now Insitut d'Optique) in 2007 and have also a master's degree in optical science from the University of Arizona (College of Optical Science). I lived in Tucson, Arizona from 2005 to 2007 and enjoyed it very much. During my stay, I worked in the Remote Sensing Group directed at the time by Kurtis Thome.