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HBTRC Honored with Partners in Excellence (PIE) Award

(19-Dec-2013)
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Team Leader: Francine Benes
Team Members: Marina Buchanan, David Ennulat, Louis Fernandes, John Hedreen, Joe Manzo, Maureen Medeiros, Timothy Wheelock, Wilson Woo

The staff at the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center is an extraordinary team that works together on a 24-7-365 basis to coordinate brain donations from around the entire US For each case that is donated to this facility, the HBTRC team must locate the legal next of kin, wherever they might be in the U.S With a signed informed consent, they then must find: a qualified individual to remove the brain, a courier service to transport the brain to Logan Airport, another courier service to bring it to the Mailman Research Center at McLean and a qualified dissectionist ready to process the brain once it arrives. The neuropathology team then processes the brains and generates a meticulously detailed report that helps to corroborate whether a person had a particular neurological disorder. For psychiatric cases, they must demonstrate that the brains show no evidence of strokes, malignancies or any other conditions that would preclude their use in neuroscience research. The HBTRC team works diligently to maintain the standards of practice at this facility at the highest possible level. They have been referred to at the NIH as the “gold standard” of what a brain bank should be.

McLean Hospital, Harvard Medical School Affiliate

Basic Neuroscience at McLean Hospital

Harvard Medical School Affiliate