Rapid advances in engineering are facilitating an enhanced understanding of biology and providing novel transformative solutions to biomedical problems. The NEBEC will provide a multidisciplinary forum for dissemination of these advances in biomedical engineering at all levels, and will facilitate the sharing of knowledge across interdisciplinary barriers. The conference serves as an open forum for discussion of new directions, ideas and approaches in research and education. Furthermore, the conference provides a setting to reinforce existing contacts and to establishing new collaborations. To support these goals, sessions will be organized covering a broad range of topics related (but not limited) to: - Stem Cells - Instrumentation - Imaging - Biomedical Design - Biomechanics The NEBEC has traditionally served as a platform for students to present their research and to obtain constructive feedback. This conference also provides an opportunity for students to discuss potential career choices with individuals from academia, government, and industry.
Broader Impact The 38th NEBEC will have a broad impact for the Northeast bioengineering community and for engineering education. The knowledge shared at the conference by researchers from over 40 institutions in the Northeast will be captured electronically and broadly disseminated via abstract books, USB thumb drives, and the IEEE website. The conference?s emphasis on students, with multiple opportunities for them to present their work and discuss current obstacles to progress with leading researchers in an intimate setting, will better prepare them for careers in both research and industry. One of the main goals of the conference is to nurture exceptional students and to help develop an environment to support future leaders in the field. In addition, the exposure to research in diverse fields will help spawn innovations and create ground breaking bioengineering technologies and bench benefit the society at large.
The goal of this project was to financially support the 2012 Northeast Bioengineering Conference (NEBEC) which was held in March 2012 at Temple University in Philadelphia. The NEBEC is a well-known regional bioengineering conference; 2012 was its 38th consecutive year. The National Science Foundation's support was used to subsidize conference registration fees in order to increase the number of students (undergraduate and graduate) who could afford to attend. The broader impact of this project was to encourage engineering students to pursue research and to engender enthusiasm and dedication to the field. Other goals were to spur innovation and communication between labs and universities by allowing scientists from regional labs to meet and exchange ideas. The conference was attended by 365 people, about 300 of whom were either undergraduate or graduate students. Students were able to attend the conference for as little as $60, although a number of travel scholarships were made on an as-needed basis that let a number of students attend for free. There were 217 conference papers, all of which will be archived at by the IEEE and searchable through the IEEE Xplore system. These papers were submitted from researchers at approximately 50 universities; although most of these were regional, a handful of papers came from as far away as India and Taiwan.
