EMBS Early Career Achievement Award 2003

Paolo Vicini

The EMBS Career Achievement Award is presented annually to an individual who has made significant contributions technologically or theoretically to the field of Biomedical Engineering within ten years of completion of his or her highest degree. These contributions must represent meritorious achievement, exemplary technical contribution, or educational contribution to the field as evidenced by innovative research, design, product development, patents or publications.

The 2003 EMBS Early Career Achievement Award is presented to Paolo Vicini for:

"For innovative developments in the theory and application of engineering software design, modeling, and simulation methods to an extensive array of relevant problems in modern biomedical research"

Paolo Vicini was born in Pordenone, Italy, in 1967. He obtained his Laurea degree in Electronics Engineering in 1992 from the University of Padova and his Ph. D. from the Polytechnic of Milan in 1996, working with Prof. Claudio Cobelli on model development for whole-body and organ-level glucose-insulin kinetics. While pursuing his Laurea, he attended one academic year (1990-1991) at the University of California, Los Angeles, where, as an exchange student with the University of California Education Abroad Program, he studied biomodelling techniques with Prof. Joseph DiStefano. In 1996, he joined Prof. David Foster's laboratory at the University of Washington as a senior fellow. He became a Research Assistant Professor of Bioengineering in 1998. He currently is Assistant Professor of Bioengineering and the Director of the Resource Facility for Population Kinetics, a collaborative resource center sponsored by the NIH/NIBIB and committed to the advancement of predictive computer simulations of biological systems and the development and dissemination of related technology. In particular, his group is developing the System for Population Kinetics, a suite of tools for population kinetic analysis, and before that he was involved in the development of the theory and the user interface of the SAAM II software system, now licensed to the SAAM Institute, Inc. Dr. Vicini has co-authored more than 130 articles, book chapters and abstracts on mathematical modeling of metabolic, pharmacokinetic and toxicological systems. His research interests are focused on software design and deployment for the analysis of complex biological systems. He also works on the development of pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic data analysis approaches, tools for image analysis, biosystem identification technology and intermediary metabolism modeling. Dr. Vicini is an active teacher, particularly attentive to present state of the art computational bioengineering research results and approaches to students. He is a member of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists, the Biomedical Engineering Society, the American Diabetes Association and the American Society for Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics.