The Centre for Functional and Metabolic Mapping currently draws its clinical and basic science collaborators from the Robarts Research Institute, The University of Western Ontario, London Health Sciences Centre and the Lawson Health Research Institute. This varied group of researchers come together because neuroscience and/or neuroimaging have been an integral part of the fabric of each of the UWO and affiliate institutions for many years. Graduate trainees in the fields relevant to this program are drawn to the very well-established UWO Medical Biophysics department, Canada's first Graduate Program in Neurosciences (now in its second decade) and the new Graduate Program in Biomedical Engineering, which was made possible by a Whitaker Foundation Award. The CFMM collaborates individually with members of various associations or clusters in the local environment and will be bringing them together to answer questions in biology at the cellular to systems level. These clusters are the Imaging Research Labs (IRL), UWO Centre for Brain and Mind, and Cell Biology.

The success of the physiological and molecular imaging aspects of this program depend on the breadth of resources and scientists that are available in our institutional milieu. The groups mentioned are all internationally respected, publishing in the best journals in their fields, well funded and able to bring other collaborators to bear on the important problems in medical science. And most importantly, they are already working together and have collectively identified the costly infrastructure necessary to take them to the next level.