Submitted by Ellie Hall on Mon, 17/08/2020 - 14:26
Andi Reci, former PhD student in magnetic resonance under the supervision of Professor Dame Lynn Gladden and Dr Andy Sederman, has been awarded the 2019 Danckwerts-Pergamon prize for his thesis entitled "Signal sampling and processing in magnetic resonance applications."
The Danckwerts-Pergamon Prize is awarded by the Department each year for the best PhD dissertation on a subject connected with Chemical Engineering. The winner is chosen from those students who gained their PhDs in the preceding calendar year.
Dr Reci’s thesis focused on developing novel techniques to reduce experimental acquisition times and improve the reconstruction quality from signals acquired in NMR and MRI experiments. These techniques made it possible to investigate physical phenomena that were previously not possible to be probed, such as the hydrodynamics of a bubble burst event.
Reci completed his undergraduate studies in Chemical Engineering in Cambridge and stayed on to do a PhD in our department.
“The research proposal had the right mixture of computational/experimental and fundamental/applied research that suited me,” said Reci. “I was funded by Gates Cambridge but at the same time had the opportunity to work with industrial collaborators of the research group. Doing a PhD also gave me the opportunity to do some supervising in the department, which was a great experience for me.
“I believe it is highly unlikely I will ever get the same creative freedom as I did during my PhD. For that, I have to thank my supervisors, the department and my sponsors. It has been great to learn from and work with amazing people in the department. Compared to undergraduate studies, you do not find many answers to your questions in textbooks or even in recent papers. That is something you always struggle with at the start of research. I believe I switched to a research mind-set relatively early and that helped me through those initial stages”.
Reci is now using his analytical skills as a quantitative researcher in the finance industry.
We would like to congratulate Dr Reci on his award and wish him all the very best in his future career.