CISST ERC Graduation

The National Science Foundation is running approximately 30 Engineering Research Centers (ERC) around the US. (Providing seed funds for 10 years.) The CISST ERC at Hopkins has run since 1998 under the directory of Prof. Russ Taylor. The CISST ERC has been really successful and they managed to double the original 30M USD NSF fund in the past 11 years. On January 12, an official Graduation Celebration event was held that brought together all the members, partners and associatives of the past decade. The full day program began with the greetings from the Dean and the Provost of Hopkins, then Dr. Taylor went through the bright history of the past years, showing e.g. how many research projects they managed to run. (The slides will be available soon.)

The professors of the CISST introduced their field in more details one after the orther (Greg Hager, Allison Okamura, Gabor Fichtinger, Peter Kazanzides and Ralph Etienne-Cummings), and also the key partners got a chance to talk (CMU, Morgan State University, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, etc).

More presentations followed in the afternoon; the Dean of the medical school talked about his vision on the future of CIS. He showed his wish list for the next few years. Richard Satava talked about the integration of information and energy. He believes the future stands for the devices that are both suitable for diagnosis and treatment, and also mentioned the self-sterilizing surfaces and organ printers as most promising applications. His quotable closing comment was: "My goal as a surgeon is to put myself out of business". The best presentation was probably from Gary Guthard, president of Intuitive Surgical (a separate post will cover his talk). A round-table discussion was next, featuring many famous and respected professional of the field.
The guests could get an insight view to the research in the CISST lab, presented by the students and faculty on 42 posters and through 11 demos. (The complete list of the materials can be found here, and the most of the works is accessable here.) The celebration ended with a Gala dinner, and thanking Dr. Taylor his leadership.
The Graduation day was also the first official day of the MRCIIS winter school. My next post will tell about that in details.