Richard Robert Ernst was born in Switzerland in 1933 and is professor of the Eidegenössische Technische Hochschule (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology), in Zurich.

He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1991 thanks to the development of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging. Spectroscopy through nuclear magnetic resonances creates a very high resolution, precise method tof studying materials. Therefore, this invention is an example of the transfer of knowledge to society, because it became quickly a widely used technique to obtain very precise images of the human body.