The Martinos Center Responds

The usual hustle and bustle of the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging came to a dramatic halt in March 2020 when the COVID-19 outbreak was declared a pandemic. But members of the Martinos community were anything but idle during the weeks and months that followed. Even as the pandemic continued to grow, many Center researchers and staff stepped into new roles to help with the COVID-19 response.

Beginning in April, Mass General redeployed staff from across the hospital to meet the needs of the surge in COVID-19 cases. Many in the Martinos Center answered the call: among them, Paula S. Lara Mejia, a clinical research coordinator with the Michael VanElzakker group, who assisted clinicians in COVID-19 ICUs by listening for alerts from portable ventilators not connected to the hospital’s central alarm system.

The researchers and staff members were glad to be able to contribute. “As someone applying to medical school, it has been very interesting to be in this environment during the pandemic,” Lara Mejia told us at the time. “I’m very honored to be able to play a small role on the front lines and grateful for this experience.”

Above: Amy Kendall. In the photo at the top of the page: Paula S. Lara Mejia.

Even as some in the Center were redeploying to ICUs, others were finding ways to help outside the hospital. A few of the many examples:

With imaging studies on hold, nurse practitioner Amy Kendall asked for a temporary reassignment to the Ragon Institute at MGH, MIT and Harvard to help with a biospecimen repository study with COVID-19 patients.

Benjamin Bearce, a software developer in the Quantitative Translational Imaging in Medicine (QTIM) lab, created, with support from the Center’s Sam Schoerning, a website to connect overtaxed direct care providers with volunteers from the Mass General community who could help with grocery shopping, pet care and many other needs at home.

Don Straney, a staff electrical engineer with the Center, teamed up with a pair of grassroots efforts, making face shield visors and designing circuit boards for COVID-19 projects.

Just as importantly, Martinos folk banded together to support one another, especially during the early days of the pandemic. For instance, in July, the Center published a cookbook collecting more than 70 recipes from members of the Martinos community, representing cuisines from around the world and covering every meal from throughout the day.

The cover of the Martinos cookbook, designed by the Center’s Laura Gee, who also compiled the cookbook.

The cookbook served as a fundraiser—the Center offered it as a free downloadable PDF and asked for donations of any amount to the MGH COVID-19 Response Effort—but it also provided a kind of salve for members of the community experiencing the isolating effects of the pandemic.

Marco Loggia, the Martinos researcher who set the cookbook in motion with a video sharing one of his own recipes, later explained: “During these challenging times, filled with uncertainty, anxieties and social isolation, sharing homemade recipes felt like a wonderful way to feel more connected; a little like inviting each other to our own homes. Talking about each other’s recipes became the start of many conversations and was an excuse to catch up, making up for all those water cooler chats that are currently not possible.”

One of the cartoons by Jingyuan Chen

Efforts to support both the Martinos and the broader communities even extended to drawing cartoons. Beginning in April, the Center’s Jingyuan Chen created a series of cartoons offering gently amusing takes on life during lockdown. She also gave us a poignant story of two Martinos staff members—senior MR technicians Mary O’Hara and Larry White—who redeployed early in the pandemic to run portable x-ray scans of patients with suspected COVID-19.