Society for Brain Mapping & Therapeutics (SBMT)

The organization started by, Babak Kateb, out of the collaboration between NASA/JPL-USC-Keck School of Medicine and Caltech through an initial summit at NASA/JPL attended by nearly by 15 scientists from those institutions back in 2003. The summit was co-organized by Wolfgang Fink (NASA/JPL), John George (NASA/JPL) and Babak Kateb (USC-Keck School). Thus, the official color of the organization is Maroon and Gold. This initial think-tanks summit gradually grew overtime to a larger think-tank international convention. in 2004, Babak Kateb (the founder), Farzad Massoudi and Warren Grundfest filled the necessary legal and tax paperwork with the US IRS and obtained approval from IRS for a 501c6 Non-Profit multidisciplinary and multi-specialty (engineers, scientists, physicians, surgeons and policymakers as well as healthcare executives) biomedical association. The Society for Brain Mapping & Therapeutics (SBMT) was founded in 2004 to break boundaries in healthcare. The society promotes policies that support rapid, safe, and cost-effective translation of new technology into medicine. SBMT played a significant role in the formulation, planning and execution of Obama's BRAIN Initiative and in 2013 pioneered the G20+ World Brain Mapping & Therapeutic Initiative, which is aimed at creating a global consortium focusing on integration of nanotechnology, imaging, cellular/stem cell therapeutics, Information Technology (IT) and devices (this approach called NanoBioElectronics) in Brain Mapping.