Richard Robert Ernst was a Swiss chemist, researcher and teacher who won the prestigious Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1991, “for his contributions to the development of the methodology of high resolution nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy”. Born in the artistic yet industrious town of Winterthur, his childhood interest was music. However, at the age of 13, he accidentally discovered his passion for chemistry and pursued it to college. After completing his PhD in physical chemistry from the Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich, he moved to Palo Alto, California as a research chemist. There, he teamed up with an American scientist Weston Anderson, and discovered the methodology to significantly increase the sensitivity of NMR techniques. After few years, he returned to his alma mater in Zürich as a professor and introduced the technique that enabled a high-resolution, ‘two-dimensional’ study of larger molecules than had previously been accessible to NMR. His significant contribution to the field of nuclear magnetic resonance has helped scientists study the interaction between biological molecules and other substances such as metal ions, water, and drugs. It has also laid the foundation for the development of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) in medical diagnostics. He is credited with several inventions and he held many patents.