BME Day 2012

On May 25, 2012, the Biomedical Engineering Day took place in the auditorium Ettore Rossi at the Inselspital in Bern. This event was organized for the fourth time by the Master in Biomedical Engineering program of the University of Bern.
The event is an efficient platform in Switzerland for networking of Master and PhD graduates and Swiss and international medical technology companies. This year’s companies introduced themselves through oral presentations and gave insight into their commercial activities and their company philosophies as well as showed their demands on junior employees. Students thus had the opportunity to get to know potential future employers and contact them directly. This was made possible between the sessions in personal conversations and at the exhibitors’ booths.
The BME Day offered great opportunities for the Bernese biomedical researchers, too. The ARTORG Center for Biomedical Engineering Research and the Institute for Surgical Technologies and Biomechanics as well as the Bern University of Applied Sciences, a partner within the Master program, used the possibility of presenting current research projects to more than 320 participants. Interestingly, Master and PhD students play an important role in many of these projects. Thereby, this event was a demonstration of scientific achievements, too.
Besides company representatives, scientists, researchers, and young academics, many medical doctors participated in this year’s event as they had the chance for intensive communication with the biomedical engineers.
One highlight of the day was the successful live knee surgery by Dr. Sandro Kohl, Senior Physician, Knee and Sports, Department of Orthopedic Surgery, Inselspital Bern. Illustrative explanations in the auditorium were given by Dr. Andreas Krüger, Senior Physician, Knee and Sports, Department of Orthopedic Surgery, Inselspital Bern.

At the end of the day, three awards for excellent academic achievements in the field of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Bern were presented.
Jonas Reber received the Medical Cluster Award 2012 for the best Master thesis for his work “Analyses of High-Speed Opto-Biological Data from Excitable Tissue”.
The Medical Cluster Award 2012 for the best PhD thesis was given to Harald Studer for his work “Simulation of Refractive Surgery for Optimization of Vision Correction”.
The SICAS Poster Award 2012 was given to Hadi Hosseini. His poster “Image-Guided Failure Analysis of Trabecular Bone under Large Compressive Strains” convinced the jury.