The 2010 d'Arsonval award was presented to Shoogo Ueno (shown here with President Michael Murphy and Executive Director Gloria Parsley), Professor Emeritus at the University of Tokyo, Professor at the Graduate School of Engineering at Kyushu University, and Dean of the Faculty of Medical Technology at Teikyo University in Fukuoka, Japan. In addition, he has mentored and encouraged many students who have, in turn, contributed to the success of The Bioelectromagnetics Society. He is shown below with colleagues (left to right) Jim Lin, Andrew Wood, Mrs. Ueno, Jeff Carson, Professor Ueno, Frank Barnes, Andrei Pahkomov, and Michael Murphy.
Dr. Ueno's work encompasses studies in transcranial magnetic stimulation, magnetoencephalography, MRI studies of impedance and conductivity, cancer therapy with pulsed magnetic fields, the influence of magnetic fields on cell orientation and growth, and changes in ferritin and iron release and uptake. His acceptance speech described the key influences on his early work by Professors Shigeaki Matsuoka, and Yutaka Oomura. He noted that at the International Conference on Medical and Biological Engineering held in Ottawa, Canada, in August 1976, his comment to Dr. Ake Oberg that the method Oberg presented was not magnetic stimulation but instead might be capacitive stimulation lead to an invitation to collaborate at Oberg's lab. This in turn lead to a range of nerve excitation studies under magnetic fields, including the surprising effect that transcranial stimulation can control detailed finger movement so well that someone without piano training could be made to play Chopin under the appropriate magnetic field stimulation!
Further work included studies of how pulses applied in one hemisphere of the brain might appear as a signal in the other hemisphere, suggesting a method for studying intra- and interhemispheric connectivity. He then went on to find different activation patterns in the brains of speakers with differing native languages reading Kanji and Kana words.
The full range of Dr. Ueno's studies will be described later in an article to appear in the Bioelectromagnetics journal.
