Ibrahim El-Sharkawy

The Mind Research Network

The Mind Research Network (MRN) is an independent non-profit organization dedicated to advancing the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness and brain injury. Headquartered in Albuquerque, New Mexico, MRN consists of an interdisciplinary association of scientists located at universities, national laboratories and research centers around the world and is focused on imaging technology and its emergence as an integral element of neuroscience investigation. With an extended community of academicians, researchers, graduate students and technicians, the MRN is uniquely positioned with its national infrastructure to link the brightest minds in neuroscience with some of the most cutting-edge neuroimaging capabilities in the world today. Founded in 1998, the MRN's initial plan called for the building of state-of-the-art magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and magnetoencephalogram (MEG) neuroimaging systems to be applied to studies of mental illness. This important task was carried out by Mind's initial collaborators: Massachusetts General Hospital's Martinos Biomedical Imaging Center (Harvard and MIT), the University of Minnesota, the University of New Mexico, and Los Alamos National Laboratory. Since both the Network and the mission have expanded beyond building neuroimaging tools, a comprehensive understanding of mental illness and more fundamental and systematic understanding of the brain, is possible.