The Bologna MRPM conferences grew out of the vision of Giulio Cesare Borgia and Paola Fantazzini, who in the mid-1980s realized that both petroleum reservoirs and biological materials could be treated as porous media and studied using NMR [1]. Building on the early foundational work in the field, they launched a research program in Magnetic Resonance in Porous Media and organized the first MRPM meeting at the University of Bologna in 1990, at a time when only a few groups worldwide were active in this area. The success of that meeting led to the establishment of a distinguished biennial international conference series, which expanded steadily over the years and eventually became part of Groupement Ampère. 
In recognition of Bologna’s central role, the series was formally named the Bologna Conference, and the Giulio Cesare Borgia Award was created to honor his scientific legacy and encourage young researchers.
The MRPM community has grown over the years thanks to the active participation of distinguished members from all over the world, who have demonstrated significant scientific activity. Their names can be found in the contributions to the MRPM Proceedings and as members of the organizing and scientific committees. From the long list, it is both a duty and a pleasure to recognize and honor the two great personalities that have passed away, Robert J. S. Brown (1924-2019) and Sir Paul T. Callaghan (1947-2012), who made great contributions to both the MRPM conferences and developments of MRPM science and applications. In Bologna, the seminal ideas of the founders have grown and continue to flourish in basic research. The most recent achievements regard the development of one- and two-dimensional inversion methods [2, 3], FFC data analysis [4], and AI design for MR Fingerprinting [5], without neglecting applied research covering a wide range of natural and artificial porous materials (biological tissues [6, 7], corals [8], rocks [9], ceramics, cements [10], etc.) inside homogeneous and inhomogeneous polarizing magnetic fields. 

[1] https://www.mrpm2026.com/brief-history.
[2] G.C Borgia, R.J.S Brown, P Fantazzini. Uniform-penalty inversion of multiexponential decay data. J. Magn. Reson., 132 (1998), pp. 65-77.
[3] V Bortolotti, L Brizi, A Nagmutdinova, F Zama, G Landi. MUPen2DTool: A new Matlab tool for 2D nuclear magnetic resonance relaxation data inversion. SoftwareX 20 (2022), 101240.
[4] G Landi, et al. "An automatic L1-based regularization method for the analysis of FFC dispersion profiles with quadrupolar peaks." Applied Mathematics and Computation 444 (2023): 127809.
[5] M Barbieri, et al. Circumventing the curse of dimensionality in magnetic resonance fingerprinting through a deep learning approach. NMR in Biomedicine 35 (4), (2022), e4670.
[6] M Barbieri, et al. Single‐sided NMR to estimate morphological parameters of the trabecular bone structure. Magnetic Resonance in Medicine 85 (6) (2021), 3353-3369.
[7] C Golini, et al. Depth‐wise multiparametric assessment of articular cartilage layers with single‐sided NMR. NMR in Biomedicine 38 (1) (2025), e5287.
[8] P Fantazzini, et al. Gains and losses of coral skeletal porosity changes with ocean acidification acclimation. Nature Communications 6 (1) (2015), 7785.
[9] L Brizi, et al. One and two-dimensional NMR to evaluate the performance of consolidants in porous media with a wide range of pore sizes: Applications to cultural heritage. Microporous and Mesoporous Materials 269 (2018), 186-190. 
[10] A Nagmutdinova, L Brizi, C Testa, V Bortolotti, L Ferrari. A comparative study of OPC, WPC, and LC3 cements by low-field 1H TD NMR. Construction and Building Materials 506(2026), 144785.