The winner of the “MITAT Best Investigator Award” and Carinthian in exile – with a PhD in computer-assisted treatment of pancreatic cancer, he is working as a clinical scientist at CASCINATION in Bern.

After graduating from secondary school, Benjamin Eigl actually wanted to enrol in medical school, but since the technical aspect was just as important to him as the medical, the “Medical Engineering” programme offered him a good combination of both subjects, which he took to immediately.

After completing his Bachelor’s degree, he enrolled directly in the Master’s course “Health Care IT”. Here, the focus on image processing and medical technology was key to his decision. Looking back, this was very helpful for his further career.

“After completing my Master’s degree, I worked as a research assistant at the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits in Erlangen for a few months. Then I was faced with the decision of either going back to Austria or starting over somewhere else. By chance, I came across the industrial PhD offer from CASCINATION in Bern,” Benjamin Eigl tells us.

The focus of his PhD was on the computer-assisted treatment of pancreatic cancer; he therefore collaborated with local and international clinics to investigate the applicability of novel navigation solutions for the treatment of pancreatic cancer. His PhD was funded, among others, by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship and thus he also became part of the HiPerNav project. This also enabled him to network and collaborate with PhD students from all over Europe. He completed his PhD at the end of 2020 and has since been working as a clinical scientist at CASCINATION.

As a highlight of his career so far, he cites a project in which he was able to follow a medical device “from bench to bedside”, i.e. from the workbench to its use at the clinic. The work processes included all steps from research and product development to medical approval and integration in the operating room.