Greetings

The ESEM Council wishes you a Happy New Year. We hope that 2007 will be a successful year for all your biomedical activities. The Council has been working hard behind the scenes to make major changes and improvements to our organisation. The Council has set itself several tasks to realise for 2007.

These include:

• A grant committee will be installed to gathers information about research funding opportunities and initiates international research projects.

• A journal committee which will establish a series of review articles, covering topics that will help engineers and clinicians to gain more insight in each others fields of expertise.

• Educational activities will be initiated to support biomedical engineering  courses. This will include new book editions, inventorying e-learning courses, initiating new textbooks.

• To promote internships for young BME students and graduates, an industrial committee will be established to promote and co-ordinate positions between universities and the medical device industry

We hope to establish a support structure for all our members that is transparent and allows new research initiatives to become easier through the ESEM network.

Technology and Healthcare

After many years of service as Editor of Technology & Health Care, Peter Niederer has decided that he is going to retire. He has managed to make our journal very successfully. According to recent figures for IOS Press, the journal got over 35,000 hits last year compared with some 26,000 in previous years. Paid downloading of entire articles is close to
3,000 last year, an 25% increase compared to previous years. Our journal is establishing itself in a very competitive market, providing a platform for clinicians and engineers to engage in research at a high level. We wish Peter all the best in the future and to thank him very much for his outstanding contribution to ESEM.

Recent and Upcoming Meetings with ESEM Affiliation

• BIOMECH 2007 Medicine meets Engineering, June 13th - June 15th 2007 in Regensburg, Germany. 
http://www.biomech-regensburg.de/

• 11TH MEDITERRANEAN CONFERENCE ON MEDICAL AND BIOLOGICAL ENGINEERING AND COMPUTING is to be held in June 26 – 30, 2007 in  Ljubljana, Slovenia. The deadline for paper submission is 01 February 2007 and the deadline for early registration is 15 May 2007.

IFMBE co-sponsored regional conferences:
• MEDICON 2007; 11th Mediterranean Conference on Medical and Biological Engineering and Computing, June 26 – 30, 2007, Ljubljana, Slovenia.
 http://www.medicon2007.com

• CLAEB 2007; IV Latin American Congress on Biomedical Engineering, September 24 - 28, 2007, Isla Margarita, Venezuela.
 http://www.claib2007.eventos.usb.ve/

IFMBE Endorsed Conferences:
• PAHCE - Pan American Health Care Exchanges ; Conference, workshops, and exhibits, Cooperation/Linkages; “Linking health care needs and technology across the continent”, February 12 - 16, 2007, Long Beach - Los Angeles, California.
 http://www.pahce.org/

• BSN2007 - Body Sensor Networks; 4th International Workshop on Wearable and Implantable Body Sensor Networks, March 26 - 28, 2007, Aachen, Germany.
 http://www.bsn2007.rwth-aachen.de/

• ICMCC Event 2007, June 8-10, 2007, Amsterdam, The Netherlands,
 http://2007.icmcc.org

• Joint Meeting of The 6th International Symposium on Noninvasive Functional Source Imaging and The International Conference on Functional Biomedical Imaging, October 12-14, 2007, Hangzhou, China
 http://ee.zju.edu.cn/nfsi2007/index.htm

ESEM Council Meeting and General Assembly

The next ESEM Council-meeting will take place during the Applied Biomechanics Congress in Regensburg (13-15 June 2007)

Council Members

Jan E.W. Beneken

Bereavement

The ESEM Council sadly lost a valued member on Wednesday, January 10th 2007 when Dr. Fons Sauron passed away following a long illness.  He was one of our council members and a very active and valuable one.  Fons was the former Director of Education of the Technical University in Eindhoven, the Netherlands and very much dedicated to the field of Biomedical Engineering in the Netherlands and via ESEM to Biomedical Engineering in Europe. We will miss him.
The Council passes on its deepest sympathy to Fons' family.

Council Members

At the last Council Meeting which was held at Royal Academy of Science in Brussels on 16 June 2006, Peter Vooijs from the University of Twente was appointed as a new Council Member.  In addition the following Council Members have stood down: Paolo Dario, Jacques Jossinet, Roman Maniewski and Norbert Nessler.  The Council wishes to express its gratitude to all for their years of service

Newsletter Editor

Dr. Jan Hazenberg from the Stokes Research Institute in the University of Limerick in Ireland has taken over as Newsletter Editor from Fergal O'Brien.  Please send all submissions to Jan at the addess below.

ESEM Book
Plans are afoot for the publication of an ESEM textbook aimed at bridging the gap between engineering and medicine.  We hope to use this as the basis for a series of symposia Engineering Principles to Medical Practice to be held at medical meetings to foster interaction between the two professions in teaching, research and clinic practice. 

Please send all your materials for inclusion in the next issues of ESEM-News to : 
Dr. Ing. Jan Geert Hazenberg, Engineering Research Bldg. - Room ER2-009, Department of Mechanical & Aeronautical Engineering
University of Limerick. Email: jan.hazenberg@ul.ie. Te: +353-61-233630