Robert Boston

Workers prepare to place a new MRI scanner into the East Building at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis June 11. The 18,000-pound scanner will be used for the Human Connectome Project, a research study that will trace the anatomical and functional connections between different regions of the brain’s gray matter. David Van Essen, PhD, the Edison Professor and head of the Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology at WUSTL, is co-investigator of the project, which will begin scanning brains of research participants this August. The new MRI had been at the University of Minnesota for a year-and-a-half to be customized for the Human Connectome Project research. To make room for the new scanner, workers removed a 10-year-old MRI scanner from the building.