36 IEEE PULSE ▼ MARCH/APRIL 2011

The weather in Boston in March may be brisk but organizers of the 33rd Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC) are already plan-ning ahead to warm-weather cocktail parties and networking fetes for EMBC 2011, running 30 August–3 September 2011 at the Boston Marriott Copley Place Hotel. The theme of this year’s EMBC conference is “Integrating Technology and Medicine for a Healthier Tomorrow.” Ex-pected to attract as many as 2,500 participants, the conference will examine the latest ad-

vances in biomedical engineering, health-care technologies, and medicine. The topics will include biomedical signal processing, health-care information systems, telemedicine, medical device design,

By Pamela Reynolds

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Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MPUL.2011.940393

Date of publication: 28 April 2011

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MARCH/APRIL 2011 ▼ IEEE PULSE 37

cellular and tissue engineering, neural and rehabilitation engineering, and cardiovascular and respiratory systems engineering, among other subjects. The five-day program will include plenary lectures, symposia, workshops, in-vited sessions, continuing education courses, and oral and poster sessions.

This year’s all-star roster of keynote speakers will include Dr. Subra Suresh, director of the National Science Founda-tion; Dean Kamen, founder of Deka Research and Develop-ment Corporation responsible for the Deka Arm, the latest project sponsored by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop a new artificial upper limb; J. Craig Venter, founder, chair, and president of the J. Craig Ven-ter Institute, who may be best known for his role in sequenc-ing the human genome; Roni Zeiger, chief health strategist at Google, Inc; David Balaban, vice president of research and development informatics at Amgen; John Parrish, CEO of the Center for Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technol-ogy (CIMIT); Angela Belcher, W.M. Keck professor of energy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Emilio Bizzi, institute professor at the Department of Brain and Cog-nitive Sciences, MIT; Kamil Ugurbil, McKnight presidential endowed chair of radiology at the University of Minnesota; and Mara Aspinall, CEO of On-Q-ity, Inc.

“Boston is the perfect venue for such a conference,” says Conference Chair Paolo Bonato, a biomedical engineer, who is an assistant professor in the Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at Harvard Medical School. Bonato is also a member of the affiliated faculty of the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology as well as the director of Mo-tion Analysis Laboratory at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital in Boston. “With so many universities and colleges located in the greater Boston area, this city is a fertile incubator for new ideas and innovation in both medicine and biotechnology.”

In fact, the greater Boston area is home to more than 60 uni-versities and colleges. The city also boasts 14 teaching hospitals that remain at the forefront of medical practice and health-care delivery. Because of its academic strengths, a plethora of high-tech and biomedical companies have settled in Boston, profit-ing from the continual and extensive exchange of ideas between academia and private sector.

“We’ll take advantage of this singularly rich and stimu-lating setting by emphasizing these existing synergies,” says Conference Cochair Colin Brenan, director of strategic rela-tionships for CIMIT and founder and former chair of the Bos-ton Chapter of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. “You couldn’t ask for a better setting for exciting and productive discussions.”

The ultimate goal of EMBC 2011, according to Bonato and Brenan, is to ignite exchanges that will lead to the develop-

ment of new technologies that may have the potential to dra-matically impact the treatment of various health conditions and disorders. Andrew Laine, vice chair and professor of bio-medical engineering and radiology at Columbia University, is serving as program chair, and Metin Akay, founding chair and professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Houston, is serving as a program cochair. Atam Dhawan, associate dean and distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering at New Jersey Institute of Technology, is the tutorial and workshops chair.

In different respects, Bonato says that this year’s conference will break new ground. For one, continuing medical education credits will be available to clinicians as part of a pilot experi-ment. Panel discussions will be hosted to bring together aca-demic researchers, clinicians, and R&D engineers, with a focus on how technology could provide the means to address clinical challenges. Also new this year is that a portion of the conference will utilize the innovative unconference format. Sessions on the development and clinical application of wearable technology will use this new format, which encourages the conference partici-pants to define the meeting program. Conference participants will propose topics of discussion through a conference blog and social media such as Twitter. While this format has been used before in the meetings of computer scientists, this will be the first time that it’s been tried with a meeting of bioengineers.

In addition to the unconference format, continuing educa-tion courses, and workshops and symposia for medical and en-gineering professionals, conference organizers have devised a number of activities to promote student interest in biomedical engineering. These include a Student Paper Competition and lunch-time sessions titled Lunch with Leaders (a series of lun-cheon sessions providing informal exchanges between students and keynote speakers). Demand for these luncheons has been so strong at past conferences that organizers, this year, have added an extra day of lunch meetings for a total of three days of luncheon sessions.

On the lighter side, the conference promises a number of social and networking events, including a “Welcome Banquet” for conference participants at Boston Marriott Copley Place and a cocktail hour for students at Westin Copley Hotel. Boston’s historic neighborhoods, unique walkability, and special New England character promise to serve as a unique and evocative conference backdrop, providing conference goers with plenty of places and events to see and do in spare moments.

We look forward to seeing you there. For the latest informa-tion on EMBC 2011, visit http://embc2011.embs.org/ .

Pamela Reynolds (preynolds@srh-mal.net) is a project coordina-tor at the Motion Analysis Laboratory, Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital.

A Fertile Incubator for New Ideas and Innovation