During the last ESEM Council Meeting in Regensburg at the University of Applied Sciences in June, 2007, the following items were discussed:

·    Bart Verkerke was installed as the new president and Joachim Hammer as the new Secretary-General. Bart thanks Clive for his great effort and offers him an honorable membership in ESEM.

·    Jiri Bursa (Technical University Brno, Czech Republic) was introduced as new council member.

·    To keep new members for a longer period and to avoid renewing the membership every year the choice of a five-year membership is now implemented in the Application Form.

·    New countries in the board: Czech Republic, Italy, Poland and Spain. Still open countries are: France, Scandinavia and especially South Eastern European Countries.

·   The number of female members and medics is still not equivalent and should be increased.

·   Representative areas of competences of the council are almost all covered, except rehabilitation engineering.

·   Regarding the journal, Technology & Health Care, it is mentioned that PhD-students can be submitted the first chapter of their dissertation as review to Technology & Health Care.

·   The council agrees that the concentration for the next years should focus on increasing ESEM activities, the definition of targets and to sharpen the ESEM profile especially aiming on BME and young members.

·    ESEM book: The ESEM primer on Engineering for medicine will be ready in June 2008 and published as papers first and some time later as book.

Five ESEM Committees were formed to increase the activities of ESEM:

1.      Workshop Committee:

• ESEM will start workshops at medical conferences.
• ESEM will organise conferences only for PhD-students, where they can present their research. About 8 BME-topics will be discussed, for each topic a lecture by an expert will be given to give an overview of the field.
• ESEM will organise small congresses with 100 participants in several BME-areas, represented by the ESEM-board members.
• For all ESEM-conferences prices will be given for the best presentation(s). Also publication of the presentation in a peer-reviewed journal will be offered
• ESEM will organise a conference on failures: what went wrong, what can we learn from it?

2.   PR committee: will deal with the website, newsletter, flyers, posters; coming congresses, vacancies, and a forum where questions can be posed will be placed on the website.

A new flyer will be made.

3.   Publication committee: will invite/collect abstracts of PhD-studies, Master and Bachelor-reports, review articles (based on the first chapter of a PhD-thesis) for publication on the website and/or Technology and Health Care.

4.   Network committee: will do an inventory on the expertise within the board and members, promote staff/undergraduates/postgraduates exchange. This will also attract companies for closer co-operations, also in terms of interdisciplinary and international projects

5.   Industrial committee to attract industries (what do they need, how can they profit from ESEM?) Members can be attracted by offering internships