Biking With an Austrian Friend: The Day Began with Doppler and Ended With Ultrasound, With Mountains, Lakes, and Bulls in Between

We biked today (Friday 8/29) with Karl-Heinz Lumpi, head of General Electric's Women's Health Ultrasound division, a maker of high-end ultrasound equipment used mainly for imaging obstetrical and gynecological patients. We began the day with a relaxed breakfast in Salzburg at the Café Classic Mozart, in the building where Mozart spent his early years. We then went down the road about 50 feet for picture-taking at the birthplace of Christian Doppler, who discovered that sound emanating from an object moving towards you is higher in pitch than when the object is moving away from you, a phenomenon known as the Doppler principle, which has important application in medical ultrasound.

We then had an amazingly beautiful ride over mountains and past several lakes. Partway through our route, we stopped briefly at the headquarters of Red Bull (which we had previously mistakenly thought to be in Colorado) to see its strikingly modern building and sculptures of bulls. We ended our ride at our hotel alongside Attersee, a large lake.

In the afternoon, we went to GE Women's Health Ultrasound headquarters with Karl-Heinz, where engineers watched intently as Carol scanned a pregnant woman. They took careful note of her suggestions about how the machine could be improved.

Leaving Salzburg

At the Red Bull headquarters (statues of bulls in the background)