The Biomaterial Interfaces Division will focus its Sunday afternoon Plenary Session (BP) on Global Health Technologies. The event provides an open venue for interdisciplinary exchange, where new, inspiring and emerging ideas in science and technology are presented and discussed as approaches to critical societal problems. Each year the BI Plenary Session emphasizes talks geared toward a general AVS audience and is open to all in order to promote interactions necessary to move fields forward through “out-of-the-box” thinking. This year’s three plenary lectures will present recent technological approaches to the daunting problems of addressing public health needs on a global scale. Thus, the Plenary Session on Global Health Technologies will open with a talk describing vaccine development (W. Foege, Global Health Program, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation), perhaps the technology with the greatest potential impact to improve global health. The session then moves toward more forward-looking methods of solving problems associated with common human parasites such as those that cause malaria (R. Darvasula, University of New Mexico School of Medicine). The Plenary Session wraps up with a talk more closely related to surface science, measurement and device technologies with P. Yager, (University of Washington) presenting on low-cost diagnostic technologies. These plenary lectures provide a spectrum of technological approaches for addressing one of the most pressing and difficult challenges facing our modern global society.

BP1  Biomaterials Plenary (Invited Papers Only)

W. Foege, Global Health Program, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

R. Darvasula, University of New Mexico School of Medicine

P. Yager, University of Washington, "Development of a Point-of-Care Diagnostics System for the Developing World"