Tino Ebbers is awarded the Uncle Adam Prize for ‘conducting ground-breaking and world-leading research on how to quantify and visualise physiological events in the cardiovascular system.’ According to his colleagues, he is ‘a creative daredevil’ who delivers and tries out a steady stream of innovative research ideas.
Tino Ebbers has often been asked how he – with a master’s in electrical engineering – ended up at the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences at LiU.
“I come from the technical side, but I find working with the human body extremely interesting. I want to learn as much as possible about how the body works, both when we are healthy and when we get sick. For me, this means working closely with the patient and close to the doctors who have the knowledge,” says Tino Ebbers, professor at the Department of Health, Medicine and Caring Sciences, HMV, at LiU.
He has a PhD in medical technology and currently works at the Center for Medical Image Science and Visualization (CMIV). In addition to satisfying his curiosity about what happens in the body, he wants research to contribute to better healthcare and treatments. An important part of his research is to develop techniques that can be used to understand the human body. Some of the techniques he has been a driving force in developing are now being used in healthcare. One example is what is called 4D Flow MRI, which makes it possible to measure and visualise pressure and blood flow in the heart in all directions as well as over time. This measurement technique is currently available in all magnetic resonance imaging cameras and is used clinically, for example to examine children with congenital heart defects.
Digital twins the next step
Tino Ebbers is already working on the next technique. Digital copies of a person's cardiovascular system, a digital twin, are created using a magnetic camera or computed tomography. This technology enables researchers to produce information about the cardiovascular system that cannot be measured, and to predict disease progression or the effect of a treatment in a way that is more specific to each individual. The long-term goal is to improve diagnosis and treatment of heart disease.
“I’m delighted that Tino Ebbers is awarded the 2024 Onkel Adam Prize. He’s an important role model for younger researchers and an excellent example of how medicine and technology can be united at our university,” says Lena Jonasson, dean of the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences at LiU, who led the award committee’s nomination work.
Tino Ebbers will receive a monetary award of SEK 300,000 at Linköping University’s Academic Celebration on 1 June.
It was Onkel Adam’s descendant Bengt Normann who in 2020 gave a generous donation to the Jubilee Foundation at Linköping University and founded the Onkel Adam Prize. The purpose of the prize is to promote medical research at LiU while honouring the memory of Onkel Adam. Onkel Adam was the well-known pen name used by the physician, author, publicist and politician Carl Anton Wetterbergh who lived in Linköping in the 19th century.
