Gareth Morris’s research concerns the development of novel techniques in nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, a method for characterising molecules by probing them with pulses of electromagnetic radiation in a magnetic field, and the application of these techniques to problems in chemistry, biochemistry, and medicine. High-resolution NMR spectrometers are essential instruments in chemical research and in solution-phase structural biology, and his technical innovations can be found in almost all spectrometers in current use.

He has contributed to the development of both software and hardware for NMR spectrometers, including selective excitation methods, improvements in instrument reproducibility, deuterium gradient shimming, and diffusion-ordered spectroscopy (DOSY). Gareth’s development in 1979 of INEPT, a pulse sequence building block now widely used across fields as diverse as biomolecular structure determination and quantum computing, led to him being awarded the 2011 Russell Varian Prize.

Gareth’s current projects include the development of new DOSY techniques for the analysis of complex mixtures, and of ‘pure shift’ methods that can generate spectra with unprecedentedly high resolution.