Prizes and Honors Awarded at the 19th Congress of the ESB
by Peter Zioupos, Vice-President of the ESB and Chair of the awards committee.
Huiskes Medal for Biomechanics
John D Currey, was awarded with the Huiskes Medal for Biomechanics. John is a retired (though still active) Emeritus Professor at the University of York, UK, who made a profound and fundamental contribution to basic bone biomechanics. John has been interested in the mechanics of hard tissue, particularly bone, throughout his academic career, although he spent some years, while mainly studying bone, examining the population genetics of the snail Cepaea. 
John can vividly recall his exact position in the room with his hand on the door handle when the engineer whom he had been consulting, said ‘Why don’t you test it?’ He had up to that moment, being a zoologist, not thought of mechanical testing. And that was it! He started breaking things and bones of all kinds in health and disease and never looked back. He has shown various things about bone in relation to mineralisation, to pre-and post-yield behaviour, and with Peter Zioupos and Gwen Reilly popularised the study of microdamage.
His first degree being in Zoology at Oxford he has always had a keen interest in the Darwinian aspects of hard tissue behaviour, for instance how do animals with, unpleasant incisor teeth like narwhals avoid hurting each other much. John likes to joke that unlike other awardees of this honour he has not won many prizes, but he considers that his life has been well and interestingly spent!
ESB Clinical Biomechanics Award
The ESB Clinical Biomechanics Award was established by ESB with the purpose of fostering the application of Biomechanics to clinically oriented problems. This year the winner was: Marcel Dreischarf who with his colleagues Antonius Rohlmann, Sascha Lauterborn, Hendrik Schmidt, Michael Putzier, Patrick Strube and Thomas Zander from Germany, won the prize for his work on : ‘INFLUENCE OF A VERTEBRAL MISALIGNMENT AFTER TOTAL DISC REPLACEMENT ON FACET JOINT FORCES, CAPSULE TENSILE FORCES AND CLINICAL OUTCOME.’
Best Doctoral thesis in Biomechanics
The Best Doctoral Thesis in Biomechanics is the award with which the ESB recognizes the development of an outstanding doctoral final thesis that has contributed to the advancement of the theory and/or applications of Biomechanics. The winner was Angelo Karunaratne, whose thesis was entitled: ‘ANALYSIS OF ALTERATIONS IN MATRIX QUALITY AT NANOSCALE IN METABOLIC BONE DISEASES USING SYNCHROTRON X-RAY DIFFRACTION’. This was submitted to Queen Mary University of London, United Kingdom and was supervised by Dr Himadri Gupta.
ESB Student Award
The ESB Student Awards were instituted by Professor Marie-Christine Ho Ba Tho at the 1998 Congress in Toulouse, France, with the purpose to honour excellence in biomechanics already at a relatively young age. In 2013, the ESB Student Award was awarded jointly to 2 candidates:
Orestis Andriotis with his colleagues David Smart, Simon P. Robins, Wiparat Manuyakorn, Orestis L. Katsamenis, Peter Howarth, Donna Davies and Philipp Thurner for their work on: ‘CROSS-LINK DENSITY AND TYPE ARE STRONG DETERMINANTS OF COLLAGEN FIBRIL NANOELASTICITY.’
Hajar Razi with her colleagues Annette Birkhold, Georg Duda, Bettina Willie, Sara Checa for their work on: ‘CORTICAL BONE IN ADULT MICE EXHIBITS LOWER STRAIN LEVELS AT REMODELING SITES COMPARED TO YOUNG MICE.’
Best Poster Award
The ESB Poster Award is given at each ESB Congress with the purpose of raising the quality of poster presentations at the meeting. 2013 ESB Poster Award was awarded to Sophie-Anne Scherrer with her colleagues M. Begon, C. Coillard, C-H Rivard, P. Allard for their work on “Three-dimensional vertebral wedging in mild and moderate adolescent idiopathic scoliosis”
ESB Travel Awards
ESB Travel Awards are given to the worthiest applicants based on the selection made by the ESB Award Committee. The purpose of the Travel Awards is to allow young researchers to participate at the ESB Congress. The awardees this year were: Zahra Asgharpour, María Moreno Catalá, Carlos Borau Zamora, Marcel Dreischarf, Paula Cristina do Rosario Fernandes, Elizabeth Anne Gallagher, Noelia Garijo Millan, William van Grunsven, Angelo Karunaratne, Seyed Jamaleddin Mousavi, Niklas König, Naiara Rodriguez-Florez, Chen Yen Ooi, Pinaki Bhattacharya, Christina Perdikouri, Patrick Kugler, Gianluca Tozzi, Mikael Turunen, Clara Valero Lazaro, Roland Zemp.
