Ray Freeman
Ray Freeman (Raymond Freeman) was a British chemist who helped transform nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy. He was born on 6 January 1932 and died on 1 May 2022 at the age of 90.
Freeman grew up in England and attended Nottingham High School, winning an Open Scholarship to Lincoln College, Oxford. He deferred his admission to serve in the Royal Air Force as a radar instructor. After his service, he studied chemistry at Oxford under Rex Richards, researching NMR of less-common nuclei such as cobalt-59.
He did postdoctoral work in Paris with Anatole Abragam and then worked with Robert Pound on the super-regenerative oscillator to build a stable, high-resolution NMR spectrometer. He spent time at the National Physical Laboratory before moving to Varian Associates in Palo Alto, California, where he helped develop double-resonance and double-quantum NMR techniques and contributed to new NMR instruments.
In 1973 he returned to Oxford as a lecturer and Fellow of Magdalen College, leading his own group in high-resolution NMR. He earned a Doctor of Science and, in 1979, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. His group worked on two-dimensional NMR and other advances that influenced researchers worldwide.
Freeman spent a sabbatical at Caltech, publishing A Handbook of Magnetic Resonance. In 1987 he moved to Cambridge to take the Plummer Chair of Magnetic Resonance at Jesus College, continuing his work and writing Spin Choreography. He retired in 1999 but kept researching with Eriks Kupce and published NMR in Chemistry and Medicine in 2003.
Among his honors, Freeman was awarded the Royal Medal in 2002. He married Anne-Marie Périnet-Marquet in 1958, and they had five children.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 07:51 (CET).