Rate My Professor Neil Stewart

Neil Stewart is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow and MR Physicist in the School of Medicine and Population Health at the University of Sheffield. He obtained a degree in Physics from Durham University in 2012 and a PhD in magnetic resonance imaging physics from the University of Sheffield in 2016. In 2017 he moved to Hokkaido University for a postdoctoral research fellowship funded by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, followed by a European Respiratory Society Marie Curie postdoctoral research fellowship at the Center for Pulmonary Imaging Research at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. He returned to the POLARIS group at Sheffield in 2021 to continue his fellowship and was awarded a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship in late 2022.

His research interests encompass the development and optimisation of MRI methods for lung and cardiac imaging in infants and children, and imaging of hyperpolarised media. Current projects include pulse sequence development for multi-nuclear structure-function MRI of the lungs and heart, feasibility studies of lung and cardiac imaging in infants with pre-term birth related lung disease, optimisation of non-Cartesian and free-breathing MRI reconstruction, and open-source software development for MRI. Key publications include the 2022 article “Lung MRI with hyperpolarised gases: current & future clinical perspectives” in The British Journal of Radiology, the 2021 article “Dissolved 129Xe lung MRI with four-echo 3D radial spectroscopic imaging: quantification of regional gas transfer in idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis” in Magnetic Resonance in Medicine, and multiple earlier works on hyperpolarised xenon MRI for assessment of lung microstructure, ventilation, and gas exchange in conditions such as interstitial lung disease and cystic fibrosis. He has contributed to position papers on protocols for multi-site trials using hyperpolarised 129Xe MRI and to studies on pulmonary MRI in newborns and children.