Welcome Message

Welcome to EMBC 2021!

We are so happy and grateful that you have joined us for this year’s conference. As you know, this conference was scheduled to be held in Guadalajara, Mexico, but due to the pandemic we were forced to first postpone, and then go fully virtual, as travel restrictions remained in force in many countries. We appreciate your patience with all of our program scheduling changes, as the organizing committee tried to adapt to the shifting conditions. We have made an effort to provide attendees with a valuable experience within the technological and financial limitations we faced. This includes:

• Re-inventing the program to make it as accesible as possible for everyone,
• Inclusion of live discussion panels for our mini-symposia and special sessions, that will allow for attendees to post questions and experience some live interaction with your colleagues from around the world,
• Multiple live networking events including workshops, “Meet with leaders”, Women in Engineering, and student activities.
• Eighteen outstanding Keynote speakers that will present and take questions live.

As for the scientific program, contributed paper and abstract presentations could not be live, but are prerecorded and available for on demand viewing. We will miss the face to face interactions we are used to, but on the positive side, presentation recordings will be available for a month after the close of conference on the virtual platform and we expect will reach a much broader audience (and we no longer have to choose between 2 or more talks scheduled simultaneously).

On behalf of our Organizing Committee, the EMBS, and the dedicated professionals in the executive office and Smith-Bucklin, I welcome you to EMBC 2021. We hope you will find this virtual conference valuable, and that in these times of relative isolation, it will give you the opportunity to catch up and connect with the larger Biomedical Engineering community.

Sincerely,

Emilio Sacristan, EMBC´21 Conference Chair