Herman P. Schwan (7 August 1915 – 17 March 2005) was a

biomedical engineer Biomedicine (also referred to as Western medicine, mainstream medicine or conventional medicine)

biophysicist Biophysics is an interdisciplinary science that applies approaches and methods traditionally used in physics to study Biology, biological phenomena. Biophysics covers all scales of biological organization, from Molecule, molecular to organismic ...

, recognized as the "founding father of biomedical engineering." He was born in

Aachen Aachen ( ; ; Aachen dialect: ''Oche'' ; French and traditional English: Aix-la-Chapelle; or ''Aquisgranum''; nl, Aken ; Polish: Akwizgran) is, with around 249,000 inhabitants, the 13th-largest city in North Rhine-Westphalia, and the 28th- ...

, Germany, and died in his home

Radnor, Pennsylvania Radnor is a community located approximately 13 miles west of Philadelphia, in the Main Line suburbs. It straddles Montgomery and Delaware Counties, Pennsylvania. The community was named after Radnor, in Wales. Radnor is home to Cabrini Universi ...

Biography

Schwan was born from a science-influenced family. His father Wilhelm Schwan was a science and mathematics teacher, and mother Meta was a physics teacher. He invariably excelled in physics and mathematics and graduated from gymnasium (German high school) at

Göttingen Göttingen (, , ; nds, Chöttingen) is a college town, university city in Lower Saxony, central Germany, the Capital (political), capital of Göttingen (district), the eponymous district. The River Leine runs through it. At the end of 2019, t ...

in distinction in 1934. He continued to study mathematics, physics, and engineering in Göttingen, and then biophysics in

Frankfurt Frankfurt, officially Frankfurt am Main (; Hessian: , "Frank ford on the Main"), is the most populous city in the German state of Hesse. Its 791,000 inhabitants as of 2022 make it the fifth-most populous city in Germany. Located on its na ...

. He received PhD degrees in physics and biophysics in 1940 and 1946 from the University of Frankfurt-am-Main. He was with the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics in Frankfurt from 1937 to 1947. In 1947 he emigrated to America, where he joined the

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest-regarded universitie ...

's School of Medicine.

Professional Achievements

During his career Schwan did much to improve the emerging field of biomedical engineering, developed its first PhD program, and produced more than 300 technical papers and gave countless lectures. He is best known for many biophysical studies related to electrical properties of cells and tissues, and on non-thermal mechanisms of interaction of fields with biological systems. He innovative works include the large low-frequency dielectric dispersion that is found in biological material, and electrically induced forces on cells. He was the pioneer in recognizing the possible health hazards of non-ionizing electromagnetic fields. He proposed a safe limit for human exposure to microwave energy of 100 W/m2 (based on thermal analysis) to the U.S. Navy in 1953, which became the basis for the present IEEE C95.1 safety standards used in the western world.

Awards and honors

Schwan received the 1962 Philadelphia Section Achievement Award of the Institute of Radio Engineers, the 1967 W. J. Morlock Award of the IEEE, the 1974 Boris Rajewsky Prize for Biophysics, the 1980 U.S. Senior Scientist Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. He was a Fellow of the

IEEE The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association for electronic engineering and electrical engineering (and associated disciplines) with its corporate office in New York City and its operation ...

and the

AAAS AAAS may refer to: * American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a learned society and center for policy research; the publisher of the journal ''Dædalus'' * American Association for the Advancement of Science, an organization that supports scientifi ...

. He received the 1983 IEEE Edison Medal, and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a Foreign Scientific Member of the

Max Planck Society The Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science (german: Max-Planck-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften e. V.; abbreviated MPG) is a formally independent non-governmental and non-profit association of German research institutes. ...

. In 1985 he was awarded the first d'Arsonval Award of the Bioelectromagnetics Society. The Herman P. Schwan prize of the International Conference on Electrical Bioimpedance (ICEBE) and the International Society for Electrical Bioimpedance (ISEBI) was initiated in 2001 in his honour and is awarded once every three years.Hermann Scharfetter,13th International Conference on Electrical Bioimpedance and 8th Conference on Electrical Impedance Tomography 2007: ICEBI 2007, August 29th - September 2nd 2007, Graz, Austria The Herman P. Schwan Award has been presented to: dr. Ron Pethig (United Kingdom, 2001); dr. Brian Brown (United Kingdom, 2004); dr. Eberhardt Gersing (Germany, 2007); dr. Sverre Grimnes (Norway, 2010); dr. David Holder (United Kingdom, 2013); dr. Jan H. Meijer (the Netherlands, 2016).

References

External links

IEEE History Center biography

Herman P. Schwan's obituary

The International Society for Electrical Bioimpedance
{{DEFAULTSORT:Schwan, Herman P. 1915 births 2005 deaths Fellow Members of the IEEE Members of the United States National Academy of Engineering IEEE Edison Medal recipients German emigrants to the United States