This past meeting BioEM2019 has just been wonderful, it has left us with good memories. Montpellier is a nice place to hold the annual meeting, although somewhat hot this year. All attendees could enjoy not only the interesting conference, but also the tasty French food during our stay in the Corum and social dinner at the breathtaking Domaine des Moures, accompanied by pleasant jazz music on saxophone.
Meetings like this cannot be successful without the effort and dedication of the Local Organizing Committee (LOC) members, Technical Program Committee (TPC) members, and BEMS Board/EBEA Council members.
Our special thanks to Alexandre Legros from Eurostim, Isabelle Lagroye, and Julien Modolo, and all members of the LOC who worked long and hard to find sponsors and all the arrangements in place for the meeting to run smoothly and successfully.
We thank the TPC, chaired by Azadeh Peyman and Micaela Liberti, as well as the dozens of reviewers of the abstracts for the very well-balanced and outstanding scientific program. Just taking the opportunity here to remind colleagues to check for spams at the period of reviewing the abstracts after the submission deadline usually in March each year. Thanks to the plenary speakers, the workshop conveners, chairpersons, and to the scientists including students who presented oral and poster papers – we really appreciated all attendees’ participation.
The plenary sessions and 14 oral sessions balanced between health protection and biomedical applications, spanning from basic research to standards, from proteins to humans. To give the participants a choice to attend the talks of their interest, sessions were set to cover biological/medical topics in parallel with engineering/physical ones at a given time. This year, several emerging areas were covered, including plenaries on 5G exposure assessment, topicality of IARC evidence for carcinogenicity from RF-EMF, interaction mechanisms, millimeter waves applications, noninvasive stimulation of the nervous system, and one tutorial on body temperature regulation. We are grateful to all invited speakers for accepting our invitation and to workshop organizers for their contribution to the program.
The week was filled with interesting sessions to follow, with a very few cancelled presentations due to difficulties in obtaining visa by the authors. We will do our best to provide the authors with relevant documentations well in advance to apply for visa in the future to reduce cancellations.
This meeting also included the student flash poster sessions which gave 24 students amongst 53 the opportunity to enhance their presentation abilities in a challenging 3 minute-format in front of the attendees, before presenting their work in more depth at the poster sessions.
During the conference a number of awards, including student awards, were presented. The most prestigious awards of our societies, the d’Arsonval and the Chiabrera awards, were respectively attributed to Patrick Reilly, who traced his scientific history back on induced currents with humor and ended with nice and emotive music on harmonica; and to Arno Thielens who presented his work on “Personal RF exposure assessment in current and future telecommunication networks”. The Arthur Pilla award of the best young scientist platform presentation was attributed to Ilaria Liorni, whose report will be posted soon.
Finally, we deeply thank our sponsors: silver: MWF, Orthofix ; bronze: Hydro-Québec/Transenergie, GSMA, Telstra, EPRI, RTE, Pulse Biosciences ; other: Occitanie district, SFRP, INERIS, INSERM, EPHE/PSL, for helping to make BioEM2019 a wonderful and successful meeting.
Results of merging vote will be published soon, and we’ll keep you informed on next steps.
We hope to see you next year, June 21-26, in Oxford, United Kingdom!!
EBEA President Luc Martens
BEMS President René de Seze
