Abstract High field MRI (3T, 7T and above) offers many potential advantages to clinical and scientific studies, including increased sensitivity and improved image contrast creating the potential for improved characterization of biological function and anatomy in health and disease. Parallel transmission (pTx) uses multiple excitation coils driven by independent RF pulse waveforms to subdivide the transmit field into multiple spatial regions each controlled by a separate transmit channel. Increasing the number of spatially distinct transmit elements and using temporally distinct RF pulse waveforms creates spatial degrees of freedom that allow the spatial pattern of the array to be exploited in the excitation process. Previous pTx work by ourselves and others has concentrated on the potential to utilize this additional flexibility to move beyond the uniform slice-select excitation. In the current proposal, we propose a program of translational bioengineering development to widely impact 3T clinical imaging and facilitate the advance of 7T clinical imaging by develop and validate novel methods to increase the degrees of freedom available in pTx pulse design together with novel optimization schemes which can convert these degrees of freedom into reduced SAR. Successful implementation of such methods potentially allow us to expand the quality of clinical imaging by providing more slices, higher flip angles, or shorter TR periods in a wide range of clinical protocols. Additionally we will develop methods which directly address the local SAR problems of the more exotic 2D and 3D spatially tailored pulses, which has proven to be a major limitation of these pulses. Finally we provide a theoretical and experimental validation of the SAR models in ubiquitous use.