Following a two-and-a-half year closure and a £22 million renovation, the Royal Institution of Great Britain (RI) has announced that Prof. Quentin Pankhurst will be the new director of the Davy-Faraday Research Laboratory (DFRL). Previously, Prof. Pankhurst had been Deputy Director of the London Centre for Nanotechnology (LCN) at University College London. Charged with undertaking research into healthcare biomagnetics—the application of magnetic materials to healthcare, Prof. Pankhurst will head up an ambitious collaborative program of 15 resident scientists, engineers, medics, and technicians. Examples of on-going research include efforts to develop a hand-held scanner that helps surgeons track the development of cancer in a patient and a treatment method for athereosclerosis that makes use of a patients’ own healing cells aided by the use of targeted magnetic force.
