Welcome
By Michael Neuman
Welcome to the October 2014 issue of the IEEE Life Sciences Newsletter. By way introduction, I am Michael Neuman, the newly appointed Editor in Chief of the Newsletter. I am a professor of Biomedical Engineering at Michigan Technological University in Houghton, in Michigan’s beautiful Upper Peninsula. I also am involved in health care leadership as the Chair of the Board of Trustees at our local hospital, Portage Hospital LLC.
First of all I wish to extend hearty thanks to my predecessor, Nitish Thakor, who has served since the inception of this Newsletter in 2012. His excellent work with the Newsletter and his broad understanding of life sciences and biomedical engineering has made his founding term as editor a difficult act to follow.
I have been a member of the IEEE since its inception more than 50 years ago and have previously edited two of its publications, the IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering from 1989 – 1996 and IEEE Pulse from 2008 – 2013. Editing a newsletter is a different proposition. Here we want to be brief (with the exception of this article!) and provide summaries of important developments in the life sciences with, in many cases, links to more extensive information. Although in some examples newsletters evolve to become more extensive publications themselves, I want to keep this a newsletter. There are already many publications within the IEEE and without that cover the life sciences but not many overview IEEE life science reports such as this Newsletter. You, dear reader, can help to keep this newsletter brief and relevant. We will welcome contributions from you of just a few paragraphs or suggestions of topics we can track down for both this Newsletter and the Life Science Portal.
In this issue of the newsletter, we present an interview with Donna Hudson, who is the Chair of the LSTC Steering Committee. We follow up with a reposting of a recent IEEE Pulse article where Donna describes the nature of the LSTC and gives some information on each of the six Founding Societies.
The formation of the LSTC is an important milestone in bringing together IEEE Societies with technical interests that intersect the fields of engineering and life sciences. We will be sharing overviews of life science-related activities in our various member societies in this and subsequent issues of this Newsletter. The IEEE Society with the greatest activity in the life sciences is the Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBS). Bruce Wheeler, the president of the EMBS, has prepared an overview of these activities for this issue. The Communications Society is also active in the life sciences, and Hsi-Pin Ma, Joel J. P. C. Rodrigues, and Nazim Agoulmine from that Society have also summarized their activities. In subsequent issues will feature similar pieces from our other founding societies.
I look forward to my activities with the LSTC and this newsletter and I will welcome receiving feedback and suggestions from our readers.
Contributor
Michael R. Neuman is Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, Michigan Technological University. He received the PhD in electrical engineering in 1966 from Case Institute of Technology and the MD from the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in 1974. His research interests are Biomedical sensors and instrumentation, Physiological measurements and perinatal medicine, Clinical applications of biomedical instrumentation, and Microfabrication technology. Read more