Training Opportunities

The training mission of the CMM is accomplished in two ways:

  1. by contributions to short-term educational, institutional and mentored training programs
  2. by directly engaging trainees in our BTRC research

 

Short-Term Courses

One important domain of training at the MGH Martinos Center is a series of educational workshops devoted to providing of-the-moment training in the technologies developed in the Center, including those technologies that form the basis of the CMM. These regular offerings include:

CMM investigators actively organize and participate in updating these short courses and workshops by lecturing on the technology and concepts developed through the TRD and Collaborative Projects and demonstrated by our Service Users.

 

Postdoctoral and Predoctoral Training Programs

Another important domain of training is through ongoing collaborations with several institutional postdoctoral and predoctoral training programs at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), Harvard University and Harvard Medical School, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST). The CMM — in partnership with these affiliated institutions and neighboring teaching hospitals — has been at the forefront of efforts to develop and apply brain imaging technologies and provide training in these technologies for individuals at all levels of the career spectrum.

Students and fellows interested in working in a particular area of biomedical imaging can visit the Center’s Investigators page to see which Martinos faculty specialize in that area.

Students are also invited to peruse the Center’s Prospective Student FAQ.

And finally, they can see and hear what it’s like to be a student in one of the premier biomedical imaging centers in the world.

 

Collaboration with Institutional Training Programs

The MGH Martinos Center is fortunate to have several well-established local educational and training programs, some supported by institutional training grants from the NIH. The faculty who make up the CMM are very aware of the tremendous advantage of having these rich opportunities, along with an exceptional pool of potential trainees and mentors, in the greater Boston area, and equally aware of the great responsibility that exists to actively support these unique resources in our local research community. As such, the CMM directly interacts with these programs in a mutually supportive relationship that also serves to bolster the research and technological development of the BTRC.

These relationships are extraordinarily important in that they provide a valuable source for trainees whose fresh outlooks can mean major contributions to promoting the work of the BTRC. Furthermore, these programs provide additional outlets for the dissemination of the knowledge and tools produced by the CMM. These training programs, primarily affiliated with MIT and Harvard, include formal degree-granting programs as well as affiliated training programs that promote cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary training in neuroimaging.

Although, as per NIH policy, no direct support from our BTRC is used to support degree-granting programs, our close affiliation with the principal biomedical engineering program sponsored by the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology (HST) provides us the opportunity to train a broad range of students on topics directly relevant to the CMM mission.

The HST program in Medical Engineering and Medical Physics (MEMP) trains students for careers as engineers or physical scientists with extensive knowledge of the medical sciences; students engage in preclinical and clinical training experiences in addition to academic work in engineering or physical science, arming them with the skills necessary to become medical innovators whose work has potential to advance human health. This graduate program enrolls PhD students with diverse backgrounds in physics, electrical engineering, chemistry, biology, nuclear engineering, and mechanical engineering. Some of the students from this program will engage in research supported by or directly benefiting from the CMM.

Among the courses in which the CMM faculty currently teach are HST 583: Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging: Data Acquisition and Analysis, HST 584J: Magnetic Resonance: Analytic, Biochemical and Imaging Techniques, HST 563: Imaging Biophysics and Clinical Applications.