Swiss Society for Biomedical Engineering Annual Report 2004In May 2004, the Swiss Society for Biomedical Engineering (SSBE) visited ICOTEC in Altstätten (SG), an event jointly organized with the APTE Medical Device Group (http://apte.net/medical-devices). The company's core competence lies in the development, production and distribution of customer-specific, high-quality solutions manufactured from fibre-reinforced thermoplasts and other high-performance materials. Additionally, the society leadership held four board meetings in Bern where society matters were addressed. Discussions focused mostly on BME education, where with the introduction of the Bologna system quite a few changes both on the University and University of Applied Sciences level will be introduced over the next couple of years. Our society would like to take an active role in these developments and serve as a source of information for potential students, professionals and educators but also for schools and the government whenever it comes to biomedical engineering issues. One other major issue currently arising is the formation of transnational entities that would like to coordinate biomedical engineering activities in Europe. One of the results of these efforts is the newly formed European Alliance for Medical and Biological Engineering & Science (EAMBES), which wants to act as one voice for biomedical engineering in Europe. In 2004, the SSBE General Assembly voted to join this organization under the provision that progress is monitored on an annual basis. The society members felt that it might potentially be interesting to join a more focused European effort to have better representation vis-à-vis the European Commission and other transnational organizations, all of them investing in MBE research and education but also supporting industry. For this reason, the society was also represented at the MEDICON 2004 meeting in Ischia in August where the first general assembly of EAMBES was held. There the aims and scope of EAMBES have been presented once again and so far around thirty different national societies and about as many scientific and educational institutions have joined the effort. MEDICON was co-organized by IFMBE and provided a beautiful setting for first class science related to biomedical engineering. The meeting itself had a special focus on "Health in the Information Society" but presentations came from a broad range of fields in biomedical engineering. The biggest society effort this year was of course the 2004 Annual Meeting that was held in Zürich in September. The conference featured a great program with 11 invited speakers, 60 poster submissions and more than 120 registered participants. Please refer to our web page (http://www.ssbe.ch/2004_Meeting) for more information and a detailed program of the meeting. The concept of inviting well established speakers in combination with poster presentations of young investigators seemed to attract a fair number of people to our society. We had applications from over 40 new members, which were all approved at the General Assembly held at the same occasion. This is more than a thirty percent increase in our total membership number from the last General Assembly, where the society had 116 individual and 13 collective members. Current numbers list 168 individual and 13 collective members. In the future, we would like to attract more collective members, especially from industry, to provide better services to all our members and to the Swiss Biomedical Engineering community at large. At the 2004 Annual Meeting, a total of three prizes were awarded and went to Dr. Michael Liebling, now a postdoc at Caltech, who won the SSBE Research Award for his outstanding doctoral thesis that he conducted at EPF Lausanne, and to Adrian Baumgartner (HTI Biel) and Tom L. Mueller (ETH Zürich), who shared the SSBE Student Award for their excellent Diploma theses. Congratulations to the winners! For the Swiss Society for Biomedical Engineering
Prof. Dr. Ralph Müller
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