2025 RecipienT

Zhehong Gan
National High Field Magnetic Laboratory

Dr. Zhehong Gan was born and grew up in Hangzhou China. In 1984 he obtained his B.Sc. in Physics from Zhejiang University and then came to the United States for graduate studies sponsored by a China-United State Physics Exam and Application (CUSPEA) Fellowship. Gan performed his Ph.D. at the University of Utah under the supervision of Prof. David M. Grant, graduating in 1990 with a degree in Chemical Physics. His graduate work included studies of the dipolar recoupling techniques with rotational resonance and rotary resonance, of quadrupolar-dipolar splittings in magic-angle spinning (MAS) NMR, and of cross-relaxation effects in dipolar spectra of static solids. From Utah Gan moved to the Molecular Spectroscopy Lab in the School of Chemical Science at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana, where he performed solid-state, solution NMR and EPR experiments. During this period, Gan developed the magic-angle turning (MAT) experiment for separating chemical shift anisotropies under slow MAS –widely used to this day for tackling sites with ultrawide shielding anisotropies. At end of 1994, he accepted a postdoctoral position in the group of Prof. Richard R. Ernst at the ETH-Zurich. In Switzerland he worked on spin-diffusion and its applications to characterize local order in amorphous solids, along with the development of new pulsed experiments.

In 1998 Gan returned to the United States and joined the staff of the NHMFL as a research faculty member. His research at the NHMFL has focused on high-field NMR, and in particular NMR of quadrupolar nuclei. At the NHMFL he explored and demonstrated the advantages of using resistive powered magnets for quadrupolar nuclei with fields up to 40 T; he also introduced several new methods to address the NMR of quadrupolar spins and applied them in collaboration with groups from around the world in a series of ground-breaking material sciences applications. Counted among Gan’s most widely used techniques are the satellite-transition MAS (STMAS) alternative to obtain high resolution isotropic spectra of half-integer spins; heteronuclear multiple-quantum correlation (HMQC) sequences to indirectly detect quadrupolar nuclei via 13C and 1H NMR; and the implementation of dipolar-recoupling and saturation-based pulses (D-HMQC, RESPDOR) for structural and distance measurements on quadrupolar nuclei. He also integrated the MAT idea with the Phase-Adjusted Spinning Sidebands (PASS) method into the efficient and robust MATPASS experiment, capable to deliver high-resolution NMR spectra of samples with anisotropies much larger than the MAS rate. Recently, Gan and coworkers also introduced the use of long and low power cosine-modulated satellite-transition pulses for efficient excitation and detection of satellite and multiple quantum transitions. These innovations have significantly increased the sensitivity of high-resolution solid-state quadrupolar NMR, enabling spectroscopy on challenging systems like those enriched with ¹⁷O.