The Biomaterial Interfaces Division (BID) has proudly opened the AVS International Symposium and Exhibition with its Sunday afternoon Plenary Session (BP) for years. The event serves to provide 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.

The 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 forward-looking methods of solving problems associated with common human parasites such as those that cause malaria (R. Darvasula, Univ. of New Mexico).

The session then moves specifically toward diagnostics technologies including low cost methods for diagnosing HIV infection (W. Rodriguez, Harvard Univ. Medical School). The Plenary Session wraps up with a talk closely related to surface science, measurement and device technologies with P. Yager, (Univ. of Washington) presenting on the development of a new multiplexed, low-cost point-of-care diagnostic system for use in the developing world. These plenary lectures provide a spectrum of technological approaches for addressing one of the most pressing and difficult challenges facing our modern global society.

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