About Us

NITRC is being built and operated under the National Institutes of Health Blueprint for Neuroscience Research by the Turner Consulting Group of Washington, D.C. in collaboration with the National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research (NCMIR) of the University of California, San Diego, David N. Kennedy Consulting of Cambridge, MA, and Neuromorphometrics of Belmont, MA.

Turner Consulting Group

NITRC’s project management and development team consist of Nina Preuss, M.B.A., Robert Buccigrossi, Ph.D., Kimberly Pohland, M.S., Kent Reynolds, Maureen Sullivan, Judith Turner, PmP, and Keith Wagner, programmer.

TCG (Turner Consulting Group, http://www.tcg.com) is a business process and IT consulting company with a focus on grants management, bioinformatics, and CMMI mentoring and software engineering best practices. TCG focuses on helping government agencies use the power of the Internet and the Web to better interact with the public, and to generate internal cost savings and efficiencies. TCG projects have won awards for their groundbreaking achievements, including piloting the first inter-agency grants management system and creating the first inter-agency government system to receive secure information from the general public. TCG was one of the fastest-growing privately-held companies in the United States in 2001, as ranked by Inc. magazine, and has been on Washington Technology's Fast 50. The company was SEI-assessed at Capability Maturity Model Integration Maturity Level 2 in April 2004 and is one of about 701 companies worldwide to have achieved such recognition of process excellence. For more information, contact David G. Cassidy on 202-742-8471 or david.cassidy@tcg.com, or see http://www.tcg.com.

David N. Kennedy Consulting

The NITRC Customer Liaison is David N. Kennedy, Ph.D., an Associate Professor of Neurology at the Harvard Medical School and jointly appointed in the Neurology and Radiology Departments at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). David also has an appointment at the Cambridge Health Alliance as Director of Neuroinformatics. He has extensive expertise in the development of image analysis techniques and was a co-founder of the Center for Morphometric Analysis (CMA) at MGH. For more information, contact David Kennedy at mdave@dnkc.net.

Neuromorphometrics, Inc.

Neuromorphometrics, Inc. was formed by Dr. Andrew J. Worth in 1998 (incorporated in 2002) to address the need for a service to obtain quantitative brain measurements using MRI. Neuromorphometrics provides Christian Haselgrove, the NITRC Moderator and Site Administrator, who has been Chief Neuroinformatics Officer of Neuromorphometrics since 2006. While the major component of his work at Neuromorphometrics is NITRC, past and continuing work includes designing, building, and running the Internet Analysis Tools Registry at the Massachusetts General Hospital and serving on the NIfTI Data Format Working Group since its formation. For more information about Neuromorphometrics, see http://neuromorphometrics.com.

National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research, University of California, San Diego

Supporting NITRC in areas of strategic direction, ontology development, and Web site hosting are Mark Ellisman, Ph.D., Maryann Martone, Ph.D., and Jeffrey Grethe of the National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research (NCMIR), University of California, San Diego. The mission of NCMIR is to develop technologies to bridge understanding of biological systems between the gross anatomical and molecular scales and to make these technologies broadly available to biomedical researchers. NCMIR is a core resource within the Center for Research in Biological Systems (CRBS), an organized research unit that facilitates an interdisciplinary infrastructure in which people from biology, medicine, chemistry, and physics can work with those from computer science and information technologies in collaborative research. The NITRC Web site is being hosted by CRBS, which also supports other large scale NIH informatics projects such as the Biomedical Informatics Research Network (BIRN). BIRN is a geographically distributed virtual community of shared resources offering tremendous potential to advance the diagnosis and treatment of disease. BIRN is changing how biomedical scientists and clinical researchers make discoveries by enhancing communication and collaboration across research disciplines. For more information about NCMIR, see http://ncmir.ucsd.edu, for more information about CRBS, see http://crbs.ucsd.edu, and for more information about BIRN, see http://nbirn.net.

NIH Blueprint for Neuroscience Research

The NIH Blueprint for Neuroscience Research aims to develop new tools, resources, and training opportunities to accelerate the pace of discovery in neuroscience research. Initiated in 2004, the NIH Blueprint for Neuroscience Research is designed to enhance collaboration among the NIH Office of the Director and 15 NIH institutes and centers (ICs) that support research on the nervous system. By pooling resources and expertise and less than one percent of the NIH investment in neuroscience research, the Blueprint confronts challenges that transcend any single institute or center and serves the entire neuroscience community. As a result, best practices developed at a single IC are implemented more widely; planning is coordinated; resources established by one IC are opened to all, and NIH working groups focus on cross-cutting scientific issues. For more information about the NIH Blueprint, see http://neuroscienceblueprint.nih.gov/.