With the appointment as receiver of the Gold Whistle Award Prof. Benes’ outstanding contributions to the promotion and cohesion of the international ultrasound community has been acknowledged.

1993 all started after the Ultrasonics International UI ’93 Conference that took place at the TU Wien and was locally organized by the award receiver, when Professors Ewald Benes from Vienna, Joachim Herbertz from Germany, Leif Bjørnø from Denmark and Lawrence Crum from USA decided to found a new congress series - the World Congress on Ultrasonics WCU was born.

In contrast to the UI congress-series, which was organized by a commercial Publisher (at that time Butterworth-Heinemann and later on Elsevier), the new Ultrasound World Congress was run by independent scientists working in their voluntary capacity.

This Europe-centered World Congress should become a counterpart to the USA-centered IEEE Ultrasonics Symposium and was scheduled to alternatingly taking place every two years in Europe and Asia or America: 1995 Berlin – 1997 Yokohama – 1999 Copenhagen (jointly with UI) – 2001 Atlanta (jointly with IEEE) – 2003 Paris – 2005 Beijing (jointly with UI).

However, the time-consuming continued competition between WCU and UI has been felt increasingly as burden, therefore in 2007 the UI and WCU congress series have been merged on basis of new bylaws, which followed basically the publisher-independent concept of the WCU. Since that, the continued strong cooperation between Elsevier’s Journal Ultrasonics is exclusively based on the currently leading role of this journal in the field of ultrasonics.

Following those new bylaws, the first merged congress, the 2007 International Congress on Ultrasonics ICU Vienna, under the presidency of Prof. Ewald Benes, took place at the TU Wien Freihaus, Vienna. After this historical event Prof. Benes continued to serve the ICU, which meanwhile is a typically 700 participants congress, as Chairman of the ICU Board (2009 Santiago de Chile) and the last 6 years as Secretary General (2011 ICU Gdansk, 2013 ICU Singapore und 2015 ICU Metz).

Herewith, Prof. Benes has crucially contributed to surpassing the fractionation of the European Ultrasound Community and to the implementation of a congress series independent of commercial interests. Furthermore, during Benes’ Chairmanship-period, the international recognition of the ICU could be sustainable anchored: The ICU has been adopted as Associate Member Organisation of the International Commission for Acoustics ICA. As the world roof organisation of all Acousticians, the ICA is Scientific Associate of ICSU (International Council for Science), is an Affiliated Organization of IUPAP (International Union of Pure and Applied Physics), as well as an Affiliated Organization of IUTAM (International Union of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics).

Ewald Benes was full professor at the Institut für Angewandte Physik until 2010 and Dean of Academic Affairs of the Faculty of Physics of the TU Wien until 2011. He still works as Expert Evaluator and Reviewer of european research projects (EC Marie Sklodowska-Curie, Horizon 2020, EURAMET) and of numerous national scientific projects (MIUR, FNFS, SomoPro, ETH, Israel SF, Polish-Norwegian NCBR SGS).

Cited Links:
<link https: www.dropbox.com s fefn5339a79kkcy _blank>2015 Gold Whistle Award Benes Laudatio 
<link https: www.dropbox.com sh _blank>ICU Cloud Archive: Here you can find all ICU kernel documents as the ICU Bylaws, as well as pictures from the UI/WCU/ICU history and its strong connection with the TU Wien.
<link http: www.icultrasonics.org _blank>ICU Relay Homepage
<link http: www.icsu.org _blank>ICSU  
<link http: www.iupap.org _blank>IUPAP 
<link http: www.iutam.net _blank>IUTAM 

Contact:
Ewald Benes
<link>benes@tuwien.ac.at
+43-664-1250001