Neil Cuffin died July 21 in Florida after a struggle with cancer of the jaw and MRSA virus. He was 74 years old. Many of you will recall that Neil was the main theoretician in our MIT Biomag group. He was my partner for 21 years, and was an author
on many pioneering papers in Biomag modeling.
Neil received his Ph. D. in Electrical Engineering at Penn State University in 1975, where he wrote his thesis on modeling the electric and magnetic field of the heart under the direction of Prof. David Geselowitz. He then came to MIT as a post-doc
to my Biomagnetism Group at the Francis Bitter Magnet Laboratory at MIT, later becoming his own Principal Investigator, and working in our group for 21 years until it was phased out in 1996. He then moved to the Epilepsy EEG Group at the Beth Israel Deaconess
Medical Center, directed by Prof. D. Schomer. In 2003 he retired to Florida.
During those 21 MIT years at MIT, our group did many of the early magnetic measurements of various organs of the human body, and Neil was right there with us, doing most of the data-handling and theoretical modeling. He published extensively
on the forward and inverse problems, and was certainly an international expert in those areas.
On a personal level, he was a quiet and private guy, serious and very decent and honest. He was especially fond of the Japanese pre and postdocs in our lab, and visited them socially in Japan.
In recent years, I called him to Florida periodically, and gave him Biomag news; he had a keen interest, right to the very end.
I shall greatly miss him. The Biomag world has lost one of its terrific pioneers.
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