December 1, 2000

A$20 million gift given by a Greek shipping family has established a new biomedical imaging center as a collaborative effort between the MGH and the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST). Bruce Rosen, MD, PhD, will direct the center, called the Massachusetts General Hospital/Massachusetts Institute of Technology Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Functional and Structural Biomedical Imaging to honor the memory of the family's daughter.

The center will help build the next generation of imaging tools with the hopes of applying them to biologically, neurologically and clinically relevant problems and will provide a hub for inter- disciplinary collaborations across MGH, Harvard, MIT and other institutions worldwide.

The NMR Center at the MGH, located at CNY Building 149, will be the home of the Martinos Center until the facility moves to its permanent location as part of a new neuroscience complex at MIT, slated to open in 2004. At a recent celebration for the establishment of the center, Samuel O. Thier, MD, president and CEO of Partners, thanked the Martinos family for the gift. "It is a great opportunity for all of us to advance a common purpose through collaboration to create what is certain to be a world-class imaging center," he said.

Athinoula Martinos was just 24 years old and a student at MIT when she died tragically in 1997. Her parents, Thanassis and Marina Martinos, devastated by the loss, wanted to do something in Athinoula's name to honor her memory. For ideas, they turned to a longtime friend, Daniel Shannon, MD, an MGH pediatrician who had successfully treated one of Martinos' godchildren.

Shannon, a founding member of HST, worked with the family first to establish a scholarship that would support the research, study and training of HST students. In March 1999, the Martinos met with key faculty members for a two-day tour of imaging facilities within Partners and learned of the new ways to monitor experimental therapies using a range of brain function measurements and other advances of NMR from Rosen, an HST graduate, and his team. They also met with members of the Surgical Planning Laboratory at BWH. These visits helped cement the Martinos commitment to HST.

"In science, there are breakthroughs and there are gleamings," said Rosen. "My hope is that the new center will provide researchers with the potential and opportunity to take a gleaming and make it a breakthrough. That's what this center is all about."

Thanassis Martinos agreed. "By assisting with the new imaging center, we hope that young people will get a chance to make a difference in science. We cannot think of a better way for our daughter to be commemorated."