2026 RecipienTS

Guido Pintacuda
High Field NMR Center
Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon

Guido Pintacuda is Research Director at the CNRS and Director of the Lyon High-Field NMR Center (CRMN). He graduated in Chemistry from the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa and obtained his PhD there in 2002 under the direction of Professors Piero Salvadori and Lorenzo Di Bari, working on circular dichroism and NMR properties of chiral lanthanide complexes.

He performed postdoctoral research with Gottfried Otting at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and at the Australian National University in Canberra, developing paramagnetic labeling strategies for protein structure determination. His work contributed to the development of quantitative methods for measuring, interpreting, and exploiting paramagnetic effects in proteins, including strategies to introduce paramagnetic tags into otherwise diamagnetic biomolecules in a controlled and structurally informative manner. These approaches helped establish paramagnetic NMR as a powerful tool for extracting long-range structural restraints and probing biomolecular conformational equilibria.

A subsequent postdoctoral period with Lyndon Emsley at the ENS Lyon marked his transition to solid-state NMR and the start of his independent research career at the CNRS within the uniquely stimulating environment of the CRMN in Lyon. Over the past two decades, the CRMN has brought together an exceptional group of scientists working collectively at the forefront of high-field NMR, creating an ecosystem where methodological innovation, instrumentation development, and ambitious applications have advanced in parallel.

Within this dynamic and collaborative setting, Guido played a central role in advancing fast magic-angle spinning (MAS) techniques at high magnetic fields through the development of 1H-detected solid-state NMR schemes for biomolecular solids. These approaches (combining ultra-fast MAS, proton detection at very high magnetic fields, optimized coherence-transfer strategies, and advanced spin-dynamics control) included methods to accelerate resonance assignment, extend the size and complexity of accessible targets, and extract quantitative structural and dynamical parameters in microcrystalline proteins, amyloid fibrils, and membrane proteins under near-native conditions.

In parallel, his work also expanded toward the characterization of catalysts, metalloenzymes, and functional materials, demonstrating the versatility of the methodologies developed and their impact beyond structural biology. In these areas, he contributed to the development of strategies for enhancing spectral resolution in paramagnetic samples, broadband solid-state NMR methods based on adiabatic irradiations and the broader concept of adiabaticity under MAS.

Together with close collaborators in Lyon, he has helped build a vibrant and internationally recognized research program, mentoring numerous PhD students and postdoctoral fellows, many of whom now hold leading academic or industrial positions. This long-standing collective effort has helped position ultra-fast MAS as a cornerstone technology of contemporary solid-state NMR.

Ago Samoson
Tallinn University of Technology
Estonia

Ago Samoson’s family was deported by the Red Army to Siberia where he was born. When he was 11 months old, they returned to Estonia, where he was educated. He graduated from the Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwaldi Võru 1 Secondary School in 1973 and matriculated at Tartu State University where he completed a degree in physics. His PhD research was supervised by Endel Lippmaa, and his 1984 thesis focused on high resolution NMR of half integer quadrupole nuclei.

During the period 1978-2010 his career evolved from junior researcher at the Institute of Cybernetics, Academy of Sciences to director of the National Institute of Chemical Physics and Biophysics. In addition, he spent time at the Univ. of California, Berkeley, Bruker Analytische Messtechnik, Uppsala University, University of Warwick, and the Wuhan Institute of Physics and Mathematics. He is presently head of a Spin Design Laboratory at Tallinn University of Technology.

Because of his early involvement in high resolution spectroscopy of 29Si and 27Al of silicates and zeolites, Ago was directed towards principles of spectroscopy of quadrupolar nuclei and sample spinning technology. This led to his invention of the DOR experiment which involves spinning about two axes inclined at zeros (magic angles) of the l= 2 and l= 4 Legendre polynomials, and therefore the first and second order N.M.R. broadening is averaged. While these experiments successfully attenuated the quadrupole interactions, they also emphasized the importance of spinning at higher frequencies, particularly at higher fields where the chemical shift anisotropy increases. In addition, it was thought possible to resolve 1H chemical shifts in solids at higher values of r/2.

Samoson first achieved r/2=25 kHz with rotors constructed from polymeric materials. He then realized that a viable approach to achieving higher spinning frequencies was to rely on the robust physical properties of ZrO2 for the fabrication of rotors and to reduce the rotor diameter. This approach recognizes that the speed of sound in the driving gas, usually air or N2, places an upper limit on the surface velocity of the rotor and with a smaller diameter the spinning frequency could increase. Thus, in period 1999-2004 he introduced rotors that achieved r/2=50-70 kHz which permits resolution of some 1H chemical shifts, and perhaps more importantly, allowed for low power decoupling. This encouraging result stimulated him to report, in 2012, 0.8 mm rotors that operate at r/2=100 kHz, in 2014 130 kHz, in 2016 150 kHz and in 2019 170 kHz. At the ENC in 2021 he presented a poster consisting of a single sheet of A4 paper describing experimental results entitled “0.2 MHz MAS”!

In the past two years, 0.4 mm rotors which routinely achieve r/2=160 kHz became available commercially also from Bruker. 1H MAS has permitted the resolution of individual J-couplings in solid samples, efficient INEPT and inverse detection. A further important feature of these small rotors is that the sample size is reduced from greater than 30 mg to less than 0.5 mg, which is much easier to achieve in many situations. Ago demonstrated the utility of these systems through extensive collaborations with other laboratories in studies of materials and a variety of small molecules, polymers and different biological materials. His efforts have enormously expanded the frontiers of what is achievable with a variety of magic angle spinning experiments.