Dear Subscriber,
We are pleased to present the Spring 2021 news updates from the European Society of Biomechanics. In this newsletter, we summarized the main activities of the ESB from beginning of 2021 although, like many things, our activities are still heavily influenced by Covid-19. As usual, all members are welcome to actively contribute information to this newsletter and to the ESB website in general. Let me know of anything of general interest, scientific articles, advertisements, upcoming meetings or particular items of discussion.
Michele Conti, Chair of the Publication Committee
From the President
It’s coming up! Only three more months to get ready for the 26th Congress of the European Society of Biomechanics! Francesco Migliavacca and his team are working hard to make this a wonderful event. It will not be the meeting that the Milan team had envisioned to organize when they submitted their bid to the ESB Council a few years ago. In view of the continuing constraints related to the covid-19 pandemic we won’t be meeting at the premises of Politecnico di Milano. Instead, the meeting will be held completely online. The atmosphere of an online meeting will differ from a meeting in Milan; no doubt about that. Yet, be assured that the scientific quality will be high and that the social aspects are not forgotten. I wholeheartedly invite you to register for this scientifically stimulating and socially engaging conference.
Read more here.
Harry van Lenthe, ESB President
Meeting News
edited by Enrico Dall’Ara, Chair of the Meetings and External Affairs Committee and Dieter Pahr, Chair of the Meetings WebPortal Committee
26th Congress of the ESB (ESBiomech2021) in Milan
The 26th Congress of the ESB will be held on 11-14th July.
Politecnico di Milano is organising the event, which will be delivered with virtual modalities. More than 700 abstract submission were received plus the 35 Perspective talks selected last years.
The list of the Perspective Talk speakers can be view here.
The 3 keynote speakers confirmed their participation.
The podium and poster presentations will be pre-recorded and will be available for registered delegates also after the congress. In this way, you cannot miss any presentation! Presentations will be discussed with authors as normally done in ESB congresses during live Q&A sessions.
The ESB Student Award received 69 submissions and the best 5 abstracts will be presented on Monday 11th July afternoon.
Two activities for students are planned: a mentoring session and a social event. More info at https://esbiomech.org/conference/esb2021/social-events/
Sponsors (https://esbiomech.org/conference/esb2021/confirmed-sponsors/) are more than welcome and will be active part of the conference with their virtual booths and the organization of workshops.
Acceptance letters have already been sent to the authors, while instructions for the presentation will be sent soon. Stay tuned!
Registrations are now open with the following important dates:
- Early registration: 30 April 2021
- Presenters registration: 15 May 2021
- Registration with all payment modalities: 3 July 2021
- Registration with online payment: until 14th July 2021
We remind that the registration fee will cover your ESB membership fee for 2021-2022:
- For ESB members the membership will be automatically extended until the end of 2022.
- Non-ESB members attending the conference can apply for ESB membership and if accepted have their membership covered until the end of 2022. For applying please see: https://esbiomech.org/esb-membership-benefits/).
Looking forward to actively interacting with you online on July! We will have a great Congress!!!
Francesco Migliavacca on behalf of the ESB2021 Organizers
About future meetings, read more here.
ESB Education and Student Committee
ESB webinar series
On 26 January 2021, we hosted an ESB webinar on CellProfiler (https://cellprofiler.org/) a free, open-source software for quantitative analysis of biological images. Microscopy images are coming to be recognized as the rich and quantitative data source that they have been since the advent of the digital image; many excellent image analysis tools now exist to help researchers find objects of interest in their data and extract measurements of images and/or objects. This webinar discussed one such tool, CellProfiler, which places an emphasis on making reproducible workflows to capture large measurement suites from many images. It also discussed the value of the large measurement sets that it can create, both for exploring desired phenotypes with supervised clustering in tools like CellProfiler Analyst and for the range of unsupervised dataset exploration techniques we call morphological profiling.
Mark in your calendar!
Next ESB webinar will be on 22 April 2021 17-18 CEST. In this webinar, Sara Checa will introduce agent-based modeling and how this modeling paradigm can be useful for biomechanics studies. By the end of the webinar, attendees will learn the basic principles to build an agent-based model including how to:
- Simulate individual agents
- Specify agent properties
- Define agent behavior and interactions
- Analyze and visualize model predictions
The webinar will be conducted by Prof. Sara Checa. She is a Junior Professor at the Julius Wolff Institute, Charite-Universitaetsmedizin Berlin, where she leads the research group of “Computational Mechanobiology”. She holds a guest researcher position at the Technical University Berlin as well. She is an expert on computational mechanobiology applied to tissue regeneration and adaptation and has a profound expertise on the development of agent-based computer models to investigate clinical-related questions. She completed her PhD at the University of Southampton and conducted post-doctoral research at the Trinity Center for Bioengineering in Ireland, at Stanford University in the USA and then at the Julius Wolff Institute, where she stayed first as a group leader and now as Professor.
The seminar will last 45 minutes and will be followed by 15 minutes of Q/A from the audience. You will have the chance to ask your questions which will be addressed by the speaker at the end of the webinar. However, it would be great if you could send your question in advance while filling the registration form or by sending to Ehsan.soodmand@stryker.com and/or rodrigo.romarowski@unipv.it before the webinar.
Click https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/4993238957232003344 to register for the webinar.
The recordings of all webinars can be seen by subscribing to the ESB You Tube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/ESBiomech
ESB Mobility Award – new call!
Congratulations to the winner of the Extraordinary Call of the ESB Mobility Award 2020:
Morteza Rasouligandomani from Universitat de Pompeu Fabra, Spain to Politecnico di Milano, Italy.
A new call for the ESB Mobility award is open. The ESB Mobility Grant aims to provide ESB members with financial assistance to carry out collaborative research in a foreign country as part of their PhD or postdoctoral research. More information can be found at https://esbiomech.org/student-section/esb-mobility-award/
Open positions in the ESB student committee
The ESB student committee is looking for three candidates (PhD and/or postdoc level) working in the biomechanics field and motivated to contribute to the ESB. The vacant positions concern helping out with maintaining the social media presence of the ESB and organizing the student events at the annual congress. Additionally it provides the opportunity to gain first experiences on activities as a reviewer on ESB grant applications and the organization of webinars. If you are interested, please send your CV and a 200 words motivation statement to the chair of the ESB student and educational committee (educationchair@esbiomech.org).
Social activities annual ESB congress
Even though the ESB congress will be fully online, we are working hard to organizing some fun social activities ….stay tuned!
Social Networks
Don’t forget to check our social networks where we post the latest news and job offers:
-Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/groups/ESBiomech/)
-Facebook students (https://www.facebook.com/groups/ESBiomech.Students/),
-LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/groups/4257919)
-Twitter (https://twitter.com/ESBiomech)
Contact us (https://esbiomech.org/student-section/) if you have any job to be advertised.
Aurélie Carlier, Chair of ESB Education and Student Committee
Treasurer’s report
Dear ESB members. As you know, the activities of our Society in 2020 and 2021 have been strongly affected by the COVID-19 pandemics; with the report of the ESB 2020 congress in Milano to 2021, and with the eventual shift from an on-site congress to an online congress in 2021. These changes have obviously affected the finances of the society… Read more here.
Jérôme Noailly, ESB Treasurer
Diversity-Inclusion and Membership News
The committee is delighted to welcome Bertec as a new Corporate Member of the ESB. Bertec’s engineering is trusted worldwide to enable a deeper understanding of human movement, with a legacy of excellence in biomechanics for over thirty years.
Also in this newsletter an exciting update from Synopsys on brand-new AI-enabled automated segmentation and landmarking tools for orthopedic and cardiology-based workflows in Simpleware.
Read more here.
Mark Thompson, Chair of the Diversity-Inclusion and Membership Committee
ESB National Chapters & External Affairs News
edited by Mark Thompson, Chair of the Membership Committee and Enrico Dall’Ara, Chair of the Meetings and External Affairs Committee
ESB National Chapters
Italian ESB Chapter
The executive board of the Italian Chapter has published in December 2020 the annual newsletter with the description of the prizes and recognitions awarded by Italian students and researchers during the last international meetings. In the newsletter, a new initiative was announced: research groups in Italy are invited to produce a schematic banner allowing to present their main activities. The banners are being collected and will be displayed on the main page of the ESB-ITA web-site (http://www.esb-ita.it). Moreover, the ESB-ITA twitter account is tweeting day-by-day a short announcement of a selection of papers published by ESB-ITA members in 2020. The planning of the next meetings is currently on-going.
Dr Michele Marino, on behalf of the Italian chapter of the ESB
Spanish ESB Chapter. No news from the ESB Spanish Chapter.
Austrian ESB Chapter. No news from the ESB Austrian Chapter.
External Affairs
Message from the Swedish Society of Biomechanics
The fourth annual conference of the Swedish Society of Biomechanics was held online on the 18th of March. Many old and new faces got to meet, and during the day there were over 80 attendees. The meeting offered 2 fantastic keynote talks by Assoc. Prof. Max Ortiz Catalan from Chalmers (Sweden) and Prof. Taija Finni from the University of Jyväskylä (Finland), as well as 21 submitted high-quality presentations by PhD students and postdocs covering all areas of biomechanics. We congratulate Zhou Zhou (KTH and Stanford University) for winning the best presentation award this year.
The general assembly included council elections as well as the election of a new president (Prof Lanie Gutierrez Farewik, KTH, Stockholm). The council would like to thank all the participants that made this event a success and we look forward to the next meeting IRL!
Hanna Isaksson, on behalf of the Swedish Society of Biomechanics
