 Hi everyone, I am a magnetic resonance imaging or MRI physicist. I have been working in MRI research for the past seven years and the question that often comes up when I talk to people about my job is, so we already have MRI scanners in hospitals, what is left to research? To answer this first let's make sure that everyone understands what an MRI scanner is. If you've seen any medical TV dramas in the last two decades then you might be familiar with this donut-shaped device. This is an MRI scanner. What might be a bit confusing is that this is not an MRI scanner, this is a CT scanner and this is a PET scanner. They all look similar because this shape allows these devices to essentially look at the patient from every possible direction and develop these high quality images of the insides of their bodies to see if everything is working all right without having to cut into them or drill a hole in their skulls. Going back to the original question, so what is the left to do here? The first thing that might come to mind is image quality. If you look at standard clinical MR images from the end of the last century and compare them to today's standard you can clearly see the difference similarly to how your phones and computers got better in the last 20 years but it's a bit more complicated than that. All of these medical devices come with a lot of settings, a lot of dials that you can turn and tweak to improve the images or emphasize different bits and pieces and this is where MRI truly shines because though all of these devices have some settings to play with, MRI has considerably more options. MRI is so flexible that by changing the settings on the single device you can have a detailed look at the anatomy or measure fat content or measure the cell density in cancer or find very small qualifications in cancer or look at tissues with high iron content or detect hemorrhages or see which area of the brain is active during the specific task, map the wiring of neurons in the entire brain, measure sugar uptake, measure oxygen uptake, look at blood vessels and so on and so on and so on. Some of these methods or dial combinations are already part of the everyday clinical practice and almost all of these techniques are actively used in medical studies and it's nowhere near over yet. New cutting edge ways to use MRI, new dial combinations are popping up every single year to help us understand how our bodies work and improve medical practice and that's why we do MRI research.