Our History & Timeline

THE WORLD'S FIRST FULLY-INTEGRATED BRAIN MAPPING CENTER IS BORN

In 1991, John Mazziotta, M.D., Ph.D., Executive Director of the Brain Mapping Medical Research Organization (BMMRO) and Support Foundation (BMSF) and Founding Director of the UCLA Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center (ALBMC), identified the need for the world’s first fully integrated center that would utilize all available brain imaging methods to study the structure and function of the human brain in health and disease.

In 1993, The BMMRO and BMSF were established as collaborating nonprofit organizations with a mission to support the UCLA Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center as well as other brain mapping efforts. Our research perspective is global and we seek to maintain and develop national and international collaborations to pursue this mission. The BMMRO and BMSF have procured over $33 million for Brain Mapping since inception.

KEY PHILANTHROPIC PARTNERS GET INVOLVED

Through the involvement of key philanthropic partners (The Ahmanson Foundation, Jon and Lillian Lovelace, Dr. S. Jerome and Judith Tamkin, as well as others) a custom facility was built on the UCLA campus, outfitted with state-of–the-art equipment and a talented faculty was recruited.

The result was a new center, situated in the midst of UCLA’s neuroscience hub. The Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center is a 13,000 square foot facility, opening its doors in 1998, built to maximize and augment brain mapping techniques. The Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center was the first institution in the world to amass the most advanced brain imaging equipment in one central location.

THE INTERNATIONAL CONSORTIUM FOR BRAIN MAPPING (ICBM) IS FOUNDED

The Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center initiated and organized the International Consortium for Brain Mapping (ICBM), a collaboration of international brain mapping organizations brought together with the goal to create the first comprehensive atlas of the structure and function of the normal human brain, which was completed in 2010.

NEURO HEALTH CONTRIBUTIONS ABOUND

Faculty led by the UCLA Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center made important contributions to the scientific and medical communities, including the following: The development of the first probabilistic atlas of the normal human brain, the demonstration of the human mirror neuron system, which is important in understanding how humans learn and is important for such disorders as autism.

The faculty of the UCLA Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center took the lead in the development of the first probabilistic atlas of the human brain with John Mazziotta, M.D., Ph.D. as the principal investigator of the federal funding that financed this 16-year endeavor. This effort which involved laboratories on four continents and seven countries resulted in an atlas that includes 7,000 normal subjects between the ages of 18 and 90 and continues to evolve.

Similarly, studies of the mirror neuron system, and its implications in human learning and disorders such as autism, were led by Marco Iacoboni, M.D., Ph.D. in collaboration with our colleague, Giacomo Rizzolati, M.D. of Parma, Italy who was the first to describe mirror neurons in non-human primates.

The establishment of imaging biomarkers in neurological and psychiatric diseases and development of a practical, comprehensive strategy to mapping an individual patient’s brain prior to surgery to enhance the successfulness and safety of such operations. Faculty of the UCLA Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center have continuously worked to indentify imaging biomarkers of neurological and psychiatric disease and have sought to use structural and functional MRI as well as PET to identify biomarkers that could be surrogates of these disease processes.