Our ambition is that through courses, seminars, social events, conferences and collaborative interactions, BIN students will contribute to bridge the gap between basic, clinical, and engineering neuroscience. We believe it is a key issue for both industry and medicine in the 21st century, because of:
Aging of the world population, which will considerably increase the prevalence of neurodegenerative diseases, and more generally of sensory and motor handicaps ;
Strong demands from a broadening range of industries, way beyond the biomedical ones, including aviation, automobile, sports, and videogames. There is an increasing need to understand how humans interact with their environments in general and with the new complex working environments of today in particular (human factor). Many industries will thus require engineers with both good engineering skills and basic knowledge of neurophysiology ;
The requirement of integrative methods and concepts, from the behavioral to the molecular level, to understand how the central nervous system functions, and can be repaired and enhanced. The neurosciences thus illustrate well the interdisciplinarity that lies at the heart of biomedical engineering, because they strongly require the collaboration of doctors and engineers, combining many different skills, in optics, electronics, informatics, robotics, physiology, ergonomy, chemistry…