The Institute

The Institute was founded via an agreement signed in July 2005 by the University of Duisburg-Essen (Germany) and the Radboud University Nijmegen (The Netherlands). Located on the grounds of the Zollverein UNESCO World Cultural Heritage site in Essen, Germany, the Institute opened its doors in October 2006 and research activities immediately got underway.

The Institute is named after Erwin L. Hahn, a physicist who made innumerable contributions to the field of magnetic resonance. Born in 1921 in the U.S., Hahn is probably best known for the discovery of the “spin echo”, one of the most fundamental methods of signal formation in magnetic resonance imaging.

The Institute is located in the former control centre of the Zollverein Coking Plant, where the former industrial character serves as the background for a modern research environment. The heart of the Institute is a 7 Tesla whole-body magnetic resonance imager from Siemens Healthcare, Erlangen, Germany. In contrast to the conventional magnetic resonance imagers used in hospitals and clinics throughout the world, which commonly operate at a magnetic field strength of 1.5 Tesla, the ultra-high magnetic field strength of this imager provides significantly superior sensitivity for structural and functional measurements of the human body.