Sara Lazar

Sara W. Lazar, PhD, is an Associate Researcher in the Psychiatry Department at Massachusetts General Hospital and an Assistant Professor in Psychology at Harvard Medical School. The focus of her research is to elucidate the neural mechanisms underlying the beneficial effects of yoga and meditatio...

Ivan Coto Hernandez

Dr. Coto Hernandez is an instructor at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. Throughout his career, he has developed multiple hardware and software methods able to enhance effective spatial resolution and imaging depth and achieve label-free imaging. Education PhD Select...

Maria Mody

Maria Mody, PhD, is a cognitive neuroscientist specializing in neuroimaging of communication abilities in children and adults, with a focus on autism and dyslexia.The goal of her research is to identify core behaviors in developmental disorders of speech and language and the underlying neural mec...

Nicole Zurcher Wimmer

Nicole Zürcher, PhD, is currently Assistant Professor of Radiology at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, a faculty member at the Martinos Center and the Director of Human Imaging in the Chemical Neuroscience Program. She has a background in biology, behavioral and social n...

The Past, Present and Future of Molecular Imaging @ Martinos

Over the past several months, the MGH Martinos Center has been both celebrating the past and looking toward the future of its molecular imaging effort – with a symposium held last fall and now a series of initiatives designed to bolster the molecular imaging community. While there has always b...

Tommi Raij

Dr. Raij is a researcher currently serving as the Director of Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) Clinical Research at the Martinos Center. He aims to understand the human brain mechanisms and improve the treatment of psychiatric and neurological disease, such as depression, schizophrenia, co...

Suk-tak (Phoebe) Chan

Dr. Chan joined the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at MGH in 2010 as an instructor.  Her current research focuses on imaging of cerebrovascular responses using ultrasound and MRI. She uses natural breathing/gaseous challenge to measure cerebrovascular responses in healthy sub...

Michael Placzek

Dr. Placzek's research focuses on studying human brain diseases with translational molecular imaging - positron emission tomography (PET). Through a multi-faceted approach, his group is working towards a better understanding of the molecular mechanisms involved in brain diseases. Their work is ap...

Bastien Guerin

Dr. Guerin's research focuses on MRI (and to some extent PET) technology development and translation to neuro-imaging to help better understand the human brain. He has several areas of specialization: (i) Modeling and optimization of radio-frequency (RF) and gradient MR sub-systems. Dr. Geurin's...

Nutrition and Brain Growth in the Developing World

The aging pickup truck bounces along a dirt road somewhere outside Bissora, one of the larger towns in the Oio region of the West African nation of Guinea-Bissau. The road, a major thoroughfare in the region, is pocked with holes. The rest of the year these would be deep and dusty. But it’s July ...

Maria Angela Franceschini

Maria Angela Franceschini, PhD, is widely recognized as a leader in the field of diffuse optical imaging in both neuroscience and clinical neuro-monitoring applications. Her research interests lie mainly in the development of novel optical imaging methods to achieve a deeper understanding of the ...

Robert Savoy

Dr. Savoy received his academic training in applied mathematics at MIT (BS 1971; MS 1975) and experimental psychology at Harvard University (PhD 1980). This period included 10 years of work at Polaroid Corporation’s Vision Research Laboratory, after which he joined the newly formed Rowland Instit...

Positron Emission Tomography

The state-of-the-art MR-PET suite houses a full range of instrumentation for novel combined MR-PET imaging, including the MR-PET scanners in Bay 6 and Bay 7 (see the Magnetic Resonance Imaging page) and cyclotron and chemistry laboratories for production PET radiotracers. Cyclotron A Siemen...

Imaging Services

The backbone of the Martinos Center is the Martinos Technology Core, comprising Imaging and Computational Core resources. The Imaging Cores include the MRI, MEG and Optical Imaging Cores, with an extensive and expanding inventory of state-of-the-art imaging facilities and equipment, including rel...

Jerome Ackerman

Jerome Ackerman, PhD, has conducted research in magnetic resonance for over 45 years, and has led the solid-state MR program at MGH for over 30 years. As of May, 2019, his work (over 100 peer-reviewed journal articles, reviews, chapters and patents; over 200 abstracts) has been cited 5048 times (...

Paul Raines

Paul Raines, PhD, was initially hired at the center as a scientific programmer in the Freesurfer group. Within his first year he took over management of all of the Center's computational infrastructure. He now manages a group of four IT specialists that maintains over 400 Linux analysis workstati...

Understanding Eye-contact Avoidance in People With Autism

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often have difficulty looking others in the eyes. This is typically interpreted as a sign of social and personal indifference, but self-reports from people with autism suggests otherwise. Many say that looking others in the eye is uncomfortable or s...