Four abstracts from our group receive a Magna Cum Laude Merit award in the 2018 Annual Meeting of ISMRM. The Magna Cum Laude Merit awards are given to trainees whose abstract scored in the top 15%. Max Dieffenbach receives a Magna Cum laude Award for his abstract entitled “Vertebral Column Quantitative Susceptibility Mapping using Joint Background Field Removal and Dipole Inversion”. Sarah Schläger receives a Magna Cum laude Award for her abstract entitled “Water T2 mapping in fatty infiltrated thigh muscles of patients with neuromuscular diseases using a T2-prepared 3D TSE with SPAIR”. Barbara Cervantes receives a Magna Cum laude Award for his abstract entitled “Isotropic resolution DTI of lower back nerves using a phase-corrected diffusion-prepared 3D TSE”. Thomas Baum receives a Magna Cum laude Award for his abstract entitled “Anatomical variation of age-related changes in vertebral bone marrow composition using chemical shift encoding-based water-fat MRI”. Dominik Weidlich receives a Magna Cum laude Award for his abstract entitled “ADC quantification of lipids with high b-value stimulated echo-prepared diffusion-weighted 2D single shot TSE”.