During the next ESB General Assembly (to be held in Lyon) we will elect 6 new members to the ESB Council. Read about the candidates here.

During the next General Assembly that will be held during our upcoming 22^nd Congress of the European Society of Biomechanics in Lyon, we will elect 6 new members to the Council. The Council thus invites any regular member in good standing to candidate for a seat on the Council of our Society. More info here.

The ESB Mobility Award for Young Researchers 2016 has been launched!

Two awards to a value of €4000 are available. Encourage your students to take the chance to visit a foreign lab. Submission deadline is 31st of May, and the winners will be presented in Lyon.  More info here

The ESB invites proposals for the organization of its annual congress in 2019. If you would like to host and organize the 2019 ESB congress and wish to prepare and submit a bid, please read the conference rules following the link Conferences-Bid Rules General 2016 in the ESB website.

Interested members can contact or send a proposal/bid to Prof. Paulo Fernandes, Chair of the meetings Committee (prfernan@dem.ist.utl.pt)

The deadline for bid submission to organize the ESB2019 is 31^st March 2016.

The 29th of January is the deadline for abstract submission to the ESB2016.

The deadline for the ESB Perren Award is Friday 26^th February 2016.

The deadline for the ESB Clinical Biomechanics Award, the Best Doctoral Thesis Award, the ESB Student Award and the ESB Poster Award is the 29th of January.

The European society of Biomechanics wishes to express it’s concern for and sympathy to any members affected by the recent atrocities in Paris. This recent event hits particularly close to the heart of the ESB since we were founded in 1976, with a large contribution from French members and will have the next European Society of Biomechanics congress in Lyon, France this coming July. All such attacks in all our home countries are equally shocking and tragic. However, we feel it important to comment because what seems to be clear about this attack is that it was an assault on international groups of people joining together. Such negative and destructive actions will of course not deter us from gathering together in France in our international community to enjoy science, engineering and cultural exchange and support each other in our endeavors to make a small but positive contribution to the world.

The fifth Meeting of the Spanish National Chapter will be held in Madrid during the 19th-20th November 2015 at the School of Civil Engineering of the Technical University of Madrid. The meeting will gather the Spanish members of the ESB who will have the opportunity to present their research.
During the 19th November two courses devoted to the opensource programs Slicer3d (www.slicer.org) and Febio (www.febio.org) will be held and, the meeting will be the 20th, where prizes and the renovation of the Council will take place.
More information about the Fifth Meeting of the ESB Spanish National Chapter is available at this web page: http://vps170.cesvima.upm.es/wp/

We are conduting a short survey to know your opinion on electronic voting; that is whether the election of council members, and other questions on which the membership votes, should take place electronically (voting from your own personal computer) instead of during a general assembly.

Electronic voting has been implemented in many other professional organisations and societies, including professional engineering societies.  After an extensive discussion at the last council meeting we feel there are a number of pros and cons to such a change. If we were to implement this change we would have to do so by changing the society by-laws during a general assembly and therefore the meeting in Prague 2015 offers a good opportunity to do this as there will be no council elections in 2015. The new system could then be made available for the 2016 council elections. However there is no sense in us proposing a by-law change if most of the membership is against electronic voting. Therefore I ask you to complete this very short survey about your opinion on electronic voting and if more members are in favour than not we will propose the change at the General Assembly (GA). Please understand that the change will still only go through IF there is a quorum number of members at the GA and there is a majority vote for the change.

The suggestion would be that information about the candidates would be released and voting would take place over a time period of about two weeks before the start of the congress and the polls would close 12 hours before the GA. The results would be announced at the following GA. The pros and cons of electronic voting are as follows (in no particular priority order).
PROS:

More members can take part in the voting process.

Less time will be needed at the GA for voting and vote-counting.

There will be less risk of ‘human error’ in the vote count.

Members who wish to stand for council but cannot attend that particular meeting of the ESB at which voting takes place will not be disadvantaged.
CONS:

The GA may be less well attended if elections are not taking place.

If there is less incentive for the members standing for council to be present at ESB congresses there may be less opportunity for voters to interact with candidates and it will be more difficult to assign and handover council roles.

There may be potential for hacking and voter fraud.
With these benefits and drawbacks in mind please complete this short survey (only 4 questions) via this link https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/LB8QZW3 to indicate your opinion on electronic voting.

The 10th of May is the deadline for the ESB2015 Travel Award.

Register for the 21st Congress in Prague before the 15th of May and benefit from early registration fees!