This proposal seeks support for the 2014 Summer Bioengineering Conference (SBC) sponsored by the Bioengineering Division (BED) of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). This year, the SBC will be held in conjunction with the 7th World Congress of Biomechanics (WCB) from July 6-11 in Boston, MA. The budget request of $50,200 to the NSF ($28,760 to GARDE, $21,440 to BME and Nano & Biomechanics) has three primary purposes: to help increase student attendance and participation at the conference by reducing student registration fees and providing complimentary student registration to 36 Ph.D. finalists in the Student Paper Competition; to provide a 4th year of support for the successful Undergraduate Design Competition; and to support a special symposium on neural functionality failure analysis and augmented repair. The conference format will be 20 parallel sessions of oral presentations, 3 poster sessions, and 11 plenary sessions. Student focused events will include a Student Paper Competition, with both oral and poster presentations, and 2 design and computation competitions. The finalists for the Ph.D. paper competition, undergraduate design, and computation competition will present their work in parallel oral sessions. All technical presentations will be supported by 400-word abstracts and compiled in a digital format for distribution to all registrants. The primary purpose of the SBC and WCB have been, and continue to be, to promote state-of-the-art research, collaboration, and scientific discourse in the broad field of bioengineering with focus on biomechanical engineering, encompassing molecular to tissue and organism-level approaches. This conference highlights students, promotes advancement in their education and furthers their careers towards becoming future leaders in bioengineering.
Intellectual Merit : The SBC and WCB are extremely high quality and intellectually stimulating interdisciplinary scientific meetings. They are, respectively, the premiere meetings for biomechanical engineering in North America and internationally. In this combined meeting, the BED has insured the inclusion of many of the traditional features of the SBC. Two Challenges, the Undergraduate Design Competition and Grand Challenge in Predicting Knee Loads, will highlight student achievements in engineering design and modeling and will rapidly advance the field through simultaneously encouraging competition and collaboration. The ASME-sponsored Student Paper Competition will highlight the research of the next generation of biomedical engineers. The winners of the BED?s Early, Mid, and Lifetime Career Awards will make scientific presentations.
Broader Impacts : In addition to the direct impact this conference will have on the mainstream bioengineering community, it serves an important cross-fertilization role. In attendance will be bioengineers, engineers from other disciplines, cell and molecular biologists, biochemists, biophysicists, and other scientists. In that manner, this conference will have a much broader impact than if it were to be attended by just the biomechanics community. As importantly, 50% of the attendees are expected to be students and postdoctoral fellows. This will have a broad impact on bioengineering as future leaders are developed through the student paper, design, and computational competitions as well as networking opportunities. Through the digital proceedings and the conference web site, information presented at the meeting will be available to multiple societies and to the public at large.
