UCL’s first Healthcare Engineering Symposium for Early-Career Researchers

The online symposium focused on 3 core themes: prevention, monitoring and diagnostics, and therapies and interventions. Through these themes, early-career researchers from across UCL’s healthcare engineering community were invited to submit abstracts. From these eight oral presentations and 27 flash talks were accepted.

Prof Vivek Dua, Chair of the IHE Careers Delivery Group and one of the judges of the talks commented: “The standard of the symposium was at the international level. I was particularly impressed by the confidence and presentation skills of the ECRs, the skills that they will need to successfully progress in their careers, in addition to the in-depth technical knowledge of their subject. Many congratulations to the organisers for a very professional delivery of the symposium and to the participants for their engaging and stimulating talks, presentations and questions.”

Prizes were awarded to the speakers who scored highest with the judges with 1^stprize oral presentation (£200) to Rebecca Baker, 2nd prize oral presentation (£150) to Benjamin Miller, 1st prize flash talk (£150) to Matthew Webber, 2nd prize flash talk (£100) to Emmanouil Dimitrakakis, 3rd prize flash talk (£75) to Natasha Liou and 4th prize flash talk (£50) to two speakers, Thomas Wemyss and Gergana Atanasova. Congratulations to all for the high-quality of presentations.

The day also included a plenary talk from Prof Marianna Obrist, IHE Digital Deputy Director and a panel discussion with Prof Manish Tiwari, Prof Marianna Obrist, Prof Adrien Desjardins and Dr Weng Wong exploring how researchers at the early-stage of their career can accelerate the translation of their research.  

The symposium was organised and delivered by early-career researchers from within the delivery group; Dr Olga Perski, Dr Martyna Michalska, Dr Victoria Roberton and Dr Martin Smith. They said: “The presenters did an excellent job of communicating complex science to an interdisciplinary audience, which sparked many questions and comments. Congratulations to all speakers and contributors - especially the prize winners! We ended the Symposium with an engaging panel discussion on how to create wider impact in healthcare engineering, with senior academics and staff from the UCL community sharing their valuable experiences. We were thrilled with the attendance and the high-quality contributions to the first IHE ECR Symposium and look forward to future events!"

We hope that this symposium will become an annual event. If you would be interested in joining the organising committee for next year’s symposium or in building your project management and leadership skills through other opportunities with IHE’s Careers Delivery Group, then email healthcare-eng@ucl.ac.ukto find out more about the group.