MARTINOS CENTER NEWS

November 24, 2009

The Martinos Center's Patrick Purdon was awarded an NIH Director's New Innovator's Award this year. The announcement and a description of his project can be found here (scroll down the page).

November 20, 2009

A new information kiosk at the Museum of Science in Boston -- titled "Shape Your Well-Being" -- will feature research on meditation and brain structure by the Martinos Center's Sara Lazar. The kiosk will be in the Gordon Current Science & Technology Center (Blue Wing, Level 1) through the end of the year.

November 11, 2009

Harvard Catalyst Imaging Consortium receives ARRA stimulus award

CHARLESTOWN, Mass., November 11, 2009 -- Harvard Catalyst (http://catalyst.harvard.edu) has received four American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA)-funded “administrative supplement” awards. One of the grants – awarded to Harvard Catalyst’s Imaging program led by Bruce Rosen, director of the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging – will help the Harvard Catalyst Imaging Consortium and Informatics Program aggregate and use tens of thousands of clinical images generated at four Harvard affiliated health care centers, “These clinical images contain a wealth of data on human illness that could be of untold value to the research community,” said Imaging Consortium co-director Randy Gollub MD, PhD. “With this grant and the cooperation of radiology departments at the participating hospitals, we can develop the research tools to analyze clinical data in ways that ensure patient privacy and quality of service.

(see original release)

September 28, 2009

Getting to the bottom of emotion stereotypes

CHARLESTOWN, Mass., September 28, 2009 -- People often believe that women are more emotional than men. This has always been the case, and indeed may help to explain why women are underrepresented in positions of economic and political power that demand a level head and steady hand. Objective measures of facial expression and cardiovascular and neural response have not borne it out, however.

In a paper soon to be published in the journal Emotion -- “She’s Emotional. He’s Having a Bad Day: Attributional Explanations for Emotion Stereotypes” -- Martinos Center researcher Lisa Feldman Barrett and Eliza Bliss-Moreau of the University of California, Davis probed the source of these beliefs. “We wanted to know whether this stereotype about the difference in men’s and women’s emotionality is rooted in how people explain emotional behaviors, not in the behaviors themselves,” Barrett said.

(read more)

September 9, 2009

An image from a study by Reza Rajimehr and Roger Tootell is featured on the cover of the September 9 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience. The study is reported in the same issue.

August 27, 2009

Emerging technique contributes to fight against breast cancer

CHARLESTOWN, Mass., August 27, 2009 -- Researchers at the Martinos Center are working to improve the efficacy of breast cancer screening by combining X-ray mammography with the emerging technique Diffuse Optical Imaging (DOI). Using the two, complementary modalities, they hope to identify tumors sooner and with higher accuracy.

(read more)

June 4, 2009

The Martinos Center welcomed Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, who toured the facility and learned about the technology developed here.

Governor Deval Patrick visits the MGH/HST/Athinoula Martinos Center on June 4, 2009. From left, Bruce Rosen, M.D. PhD, Gregory Sorensen, M.D., Governor Deval Patrick, Daniel C. Shannon, M.D., and Martha L. Gray Ph.D.

Governor Deval Patrick reviews the "Brain Bucket" technology developed at the MGH/HST/Athinoula Martinos Center