EMBEC'02 Young Investigators Competition Report

During initial discussions concerning the setting up of the first European Medical & Biological Engineering Conference - EMBEC'99 we agreed that the conference should not only attract well known scientists but also young researchers that have just started their careers. We therfore decided to set up a Young Investigators Competition to encurage young scientist to present and discuss their work personally at our conference. As the Young Investigators Competition was such a success during EMBEC'99 we decided to make it a tradition for the next conference in 2002.

During the call for papers we invited young investigators (born no earlier than 1971) to participate in the Young Investigators Competition. Two awards of euro 400 were to be given, together with a certificate, in two categories, one for the best oral presentation and one for the best poster presentation. We had 111 nominations for the best oral presentation and 75 nominations for the best poster presentation, which was more than three times the amount of entries for the first EMBEC in 1999.

Due to Biological and Biomedical Engineering being such a wide field, it is practically impossible for a small jury to judge the relevance and scientific impact of all the papers involved. Therefore we invited the chairpersons to help us evaluate the presentations in the competition. We also decided not to set up special sessions for the student competition but to include all the papers in the regular scientific program. This underlined our belief that student competition papers are not second class, but papers of developing young scientists - the elite of the future.

Our aim was to honor not only the scientific content of the presented work (60%) but also the quality of the presentation (20%) and the answers in the discussion (20%). Due to the high scientific quality of most papers in the Young Investigators Competition it was not an easy task to determine the winners. We finally got the oportunity to present two additional honorary awards in the category for the best poster presentations and four additional honorary awards in the category for the best oral presentation. The honorary awards were accompanied by a certificate and a book. The winners in the Young Investigators award were:

For the best poster presentation

  1. Bae-Hyung KimMultiple transmit focusing with modified orthogonal Golay codes
  2. Amalric Montalibet Electrical conductivity interface scanning by ultrasonically-induced Lorentz force
  3. Björn Schelter Application of graphical models in bilateral essential tremor

For the best oral presentation

  1. Brandon Travis In vivo quantification of the turbulent stresses in bileaflet mechanical heart valve leakage flow
  2. Doron Bushi Cardioembolism - hemodynamic evaluation of cardioembolic trajectory
  3. Sónja Gonçalves In vivo measurement of the skull and brain resistivity using a method based on electric impedance tomography
  4. Hugo Magalhães A matlab smart adaptive system for the control of neuromuscular blockade
  5. Hirokazu Takahashi Multiple gating stimulation for selective activation of nerves in between electrodes

Finally, I want to thank all the participants and chairpersons for a contribution that made the Young Investigators competition such a success at EMBEC'02.

Prof. Heinz-Bodo Schmiedmayer, YIC Chair