Dr. James Eills, PhD
Group Leader of the “Hyperpolarization Methods Lab” at Forschungszentrum Jülich, Helmholtz Association.
James was born in 1993 in London, spent five years of his childhood in New Jersey (USA), and from the age of 10 grew up in an English village north of Brighton. He studied Chemistry at the University of Southampton from 2011 to 2015, completing his Master’s research at the University of California, Berkeley, under the supervision of Prof. Alex Pines and Prof. Dmitry Budker, where he investigated molecular parity violation using optically polarized xenon.
He returned to Southampton to pursue a PhD in Chemistry under the supervision of Prof. Malcolm Levitt, focusing on hyperpolarization techniques and microfluidic NMR. In 2018, he joined Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Matter-AntiMatter section of the Helmholtz Institute, where he developed zero- and ultralow-field NMR methods.
In 2021, he moved to the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC) in Barcelona on a Marie Curie Individual Fellowship, developing noninvasive metabolic imaging techniques in organ-on-a-chip devices for personalized medicine. Following a six-month stay at NVision Imaging Technologies in Ulm, he went on to establish the Hyperpolarization Methods Lab at Forschungszentrum Jülich.
Academic Timeline
Prizes and Awards
Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize (€200,000) of the DFG, 2025
Erwin-Schrödinger Award (€50,000) of the Helmholtz Association 2021 - Generating an enhanced MRI contrast agent with hydrogen gas
Young Scientist in Magnetic Resonance Award at Euromar 2016, Magnetic Resonance in Chemistry
Grants and Funding
€1.5M Helmholtz Young Investigator Group: Enhanced Sensing with Hyperpolarized Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, 2024
€200,000 Marie Curie Individual Fellowship: Hyperpolarized sensors for probing metabolism in microfluidic organ-on-chip platforms, 2022
€130,000 Research Fellowship awarded by Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology / Fundació Bosch Aymerich, 2022
€450,000 DFG 3-year research grant: Hyperpolarized Zero- to Ultralow-Field Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, 2021
£600 Researcher Development Grant from the Royal Society of Chemistry, 2022
€14,500 Johannes-Gutenberg University Research Funding, 2019
£750 Researcher Mobility Grant from the Royal Society of Chemistry, 2018
€3250 Short-term Research Grant from the DAAD, 2015
Conference Lectures and Teaching
Invited Talk: Parahydrogen-Induced Polarization in Microfluidics and Biomedicine, RSC NMRDG, Nottingham, 2023
Parahydrogen-Induced Polarization for Metabolic Imaging in Organ-on-a-Chip Devices, HYP23, Leipzig, 2023
Teaching at the Jaca 2022 NMR Summer School: Hyperpolarized NMR
Hyperpolarizing [13C]fumarate for metabolic magnetic resonance imaging, SEQT Symposium, Barcelona, 2022
NMR Spectroscopy without the Magnet: Observing Metabolism with Hyperpolarization-Enhanced Zero- to Ultralow-Field NMR, HYP21, Lyon, 2021
Invited Talk: Hyperpolarization-enhanced NMR using parahydrogen-polarized [1‑13C]fumarate, ISMAR-APNMR, 2021
Invited Talk: Singlet-contrast imaging for hyperpolarized MRI, ICMRM 2021
Parahydrogen-polarized [1-13C]fumarate - State-of-the-art and future directions, PERM, online intl. conference, 2021
NMR Spectroscopy without the Magnet, Analytical Research Forum 2021
Metabolic NMR without the magnet, Euromar 2020
Parahydrogen-enhanced NMR - methodology and applications, Intercontinental NMR Seminar Series, 2020
Singlet-Contrast Magnetic Resonance Imaging, PERM, online intl. conference, 2020
Parahydrogen-polarized [1-13C]fumarate – a path to in vivo application, PERM, online intl. conference, 2020
Polarization transfer in [1-13C]fumarate using constant-adiabaticity field sweeps, SCM, St Petersburg, Russia, 2019
Parahydrogen-induced hyperpolarization in ZULF NMR, ZULF ITN, Germany, 2019
Field-swept polarization transfer in parahydrogen-enhanced NMR, HYP18, England, 2018
Preservation of nuclear spin order by precipitation, Euromar, Poland, 2017
A simple method to convert parahydrogen singlet order into observable magnetization on a nearby carbon nucleus, Euromar, Denmark, 2016