Janez Stepišnik was born on April 6,
1940 in Ljubljana. He started his carrier in year 1963 as an engineer of
physics at the research-development labs of the electro-company Iskra in Slovenia. Later in 1966, he got a job as a young scientist
at the Jožef Stefan Institute and continued PhD
studies at the Department of Physics of the University of Ljubljana. In 1971,
he received PhD with
a thesis on the study of ferroelectrics by NMR methods. In 1971 he became an
assistant professor of physics and later in 1975 a professor of experimental
and modern physics at the University of Ljubljana. During his postdoc at the
University of Washington in Seattle in 1973-74, he studied diffusion in
super-ion conductors. In 1994-1995, he was a visiting professor at Massey
University in New Zealand, where he developed a new NMR method, named the modulated
gradient spin echo. In years 2002-04, during his sabbatical, he lectured at Wageningen University, the Netherland, at RWTH, Aachen, Germany, at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA, at the University of California,
Berkeley, USA, at New Mexico Resonance Labs, Albuquerque, USA, at Harvard Medical
School, USA, at the Institute of Polymers, Dresden,
Germany and at the Montana State University, Bozeman, USA.
In the years 1984–1986, Janez Stepišnik headed the Association for Mathematics,
Physics and Astronomy of Slovenia. He was the head of the Department of Physics
at the University of Ljubljana in years 1987–89. He organized the 14th European
Experimental NMR Conference in Bled, 1998, and was chairman of the
International Committee of European Experimental NMR Conferences from 2000 to
2005. Since 2003 he has been a member of the Scientific Committee and a
lecturer at the international AMPERE NMR Summer School in Poland.
In 1977, he received the National Science Foundation Award for Achievement in
Measuring Molecular Movements with NMR and the same foundation award for the
patent in the field of ultrasound in 1985.
In 1976, during his postdoc at the
University of Washington, he found a link between the attenuation of spin echo
in an inhomogeneous magnetic field and a spectrum of molecular translation
velocity autocorrelations that predicts possibility of direct measurements of
molecular dynamics by NMR methods. This idea was realized in 1995 in the
laboratories of Paul.T. Callaghan in New Zealand,
with the development of the method "NMR modulated gradient spin
echo".
In 1981, he introduced an ultrasonic method for measuring the degree of
hydration of cement paste using the reflection of shear waves, which became the
standard test method in the cement and construction industries.
In 1986, he demonstrated the
possibility of using a weak geomagnetic field for magnetic resonance imaging to
lower the cost of MR imaging devices.
In 2005, they increased the
frequency range of the NMR-modulated spin echo gradient method above 10 kHz,
which made it possible to study translational diffusion in excited granular
systems, limited diffusion in nano-pore systems, and
molecular dynamics in liquids and polymers..
His bibliography includes more than
250 publications in international scientific journals, books and proceedings of
international conferences with about 2000 citations, where the most frequently
mentioned are:
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·
"Analysis
of NMR self-diffusion measurements by a density matrix calculation" in Physica B+C, 1981, ·
"The
cement hydration measured by ultrasonic" in Ceramic Bulletin, 1981 ·
"Spatially-Distributed
Pulsed Gradient Spin Echo NMR using Single-Wire Proximity " in Physical
Review Letters, 1995, |
|
·
"Generalized
Analysis of Motion Using Magnetic Field Gradients" in the book series
Advances in Magnetic and Optical Resonance, vol. 19, Academic Press 1996, ·
"Autocorrelation
spectra of an air-fluidized granular system measured by NMR" in Europhysics Letters, 2006, |
|
·
"NMR down
to Earth" in Nature, 2006, |
|
·
"NMR in
the Earth's magnetic field " in Progress in NMR Spectroscopy, Pergamon Press 2009, |
|
·
"Self-diffusion
in nanopores studied by the NMR pulse gradient spin
echo" in EuroPhysics Letters, 2012, |
|
·
"Velocity
autocorrelation spectra in molten polymer measured by NMR modulated gradient
spin-echo", in EuroPhysics Letters, 2014, |
|
·
"Usage of
internal magnetic fields to study the early hydration process of cement paste
by MGSE method", in Journal of Magnetic Resonance, 2016, ·
“Molecular velocity auto-correlations in
glycerol/water mixtures studied by NMR MGSE method”, in Physica
A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2020. |