Engineering of Life: International Conference on Biomedical Engineering

The International Biomedical Engineering Conference was held at the end of February 2020 at the Haifa Congress Center, led by the Israel Society for Medical and Biological Engineering (ISMBE) and sponsored by the IEEE – the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. The ISMBE conference serves as a meeting of academic researchers across the wide spectrum of the biomedical engineering field in Israel and the world and connects researchers and students from all the universities, physicians, healthcare professionals, and Israeli and international industry.

The event opened with the greetings of Conference Chair, Prof. Tamir Tuller of Tel Aviv University and Prof. Daphne Weihs, of the Technion’s Faculty of Biomedical Engineering, the new President of the ISMBE.

Many diverse topics were discussed at the conference including characterization of Crohn’s disease, portable and deep ultrasound imaging, blood flow and oxygen monitoring in the placenta, a smart chip for the study of ALS muscular dystrophy, innovative technologies for gluing and sealing (damaged) tissue, packaging (microencapsulation) of pancreas cells, a platform for drug-choice for delivery to the brain, mechanobiology of cancer and wounds, artificial cells for drug delivery, and tissue engineering in spinal cord injury rehabilitation. The second plenary lecture was delivered by Prof. Ron Weiss of MIT in the USA, who spoke about synthetic biology in mammalian cells and its integration into developing solutions to medical problems.

In continuation of a tradition that was established last year, popular science lectures on various topics in Biomedical Engineering were given in Hebrew to hundreds of high school students and the general public.

Two new Honorary Members of the Society were announced at the conference: Prof. Moshe Shoaham and Prof. David Elad. Excellence awards were given to selected doctoral students. During the conference, some 90 posters were presented, and prizes were awarded to four outstanding posters.

Read the special report at the Technion’s website.