MGH Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging 2016 | Page 5

Funding Outlook Is Improving
Executive Director Bill Shaw on the overall funding environment for the Center
The Martinos Center is one of the world’s largest and most comprehensive
academic biomedical imaging research enterprises. There are over 150 investigators with funding at the Center. This is a diverse and experienced group
that as a whole is even more impressive in its makeup than any one individual.
The highlights in the annual report provide snapshots of their efforts. Here,
though, I’d like to focus on the funding environment at the Center.
The Center is part of the Dept. of Radiology at Massachusetts General Hospital, a major recipient of biomedical research dollars. MGH will receive over
800 awards from the NIH in 2016 calendar year, with an average award of
around $360,000. MGH is also, of course, one of the member hospitals of the
Partners Healthcare System. This combined research enterprise is the largest
recipient of NIH funding in the country, receiving over 3% of its funding.
Let’s take a closer look at the Martinos Center. The Center represents about
5% of the total research activity at MGH. In the past year, grants awarded to Martinos investigators totaled more
than $19 million, a considerable increase over the $13 million awarded the year before. The more than 100 grants
funded included projects as varied as a study of neonatal imaging as an early marker of neurodevelopment and
predictor of cognitive performance in infants exposed to HIV and ART, in vivo imaging of Alzheimer’s Disease pathology using optical microscopy techniques, and noninvasive PET imaging of epigenetic mechanisms in human
memory. Over the course of the Center’s lifetime, its investigators have been awarded hundreds of grants, with a
cumulative sum of almost $200 million. The group’s success rate is over 30% higher than the national average.
Like the overall institution, the majority of the funding for the Center comes from the National Institutes of Health.
We’ve seen some relatively flat years in NIH funding of late, but the picture is starting to improve. The NIH’s budget in FY16 is approximately $31 billion, representing a small increase over FY15. There is a request in for the
FY17 budget by the NIH for a total amount of a 33.1 billion, representing a growth opportunity for the Center.
We are fortunate to be in the heart of the greater Boston biomedical research environment. Massachusetts, as a
whole, received over $2.5 billion in NIH funding in 2015. In 2012, it was home to 2,090 bioscience business establishments. Residents held 77,817 bioscience industry jobs, and the average annual wage in the bioscience sector
was $52,869, higher than the private sector overall. And more and more companies are coming to Massachusetts—
mostly to Boston—because of its talent and its rich set of unique scientific resources: not least, the MGH Martinos
Center for Biomedical Imaging.
Given all of this, it is hard to see anything but another productive and successful year for the faculty at the Martinos
Center.

William Shaw, Executive Director
Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging