INPhINIT Incoming Fellowship – Active systems for biomedical applications
josep.puigmarti@ub.edu
RESEARCH PRODUCT / RESEARCH GROUP
https://www.ub.edu/cheminflowgroup/home/
Nature provides countless examples of stimuli responsive materials displaying sophisticated functions. For example, plants can transform light into energy due to the precise positioning of chlorophyll moieties in a cooperative and hierarchical manner. Inspired by nature, researchers have made great efforts to design, synthesize and use molecules with structure-specific interactions to yield functional hierarchical assemblies that can respond to external stimuli. This has generated a multitude of developments that laid to the foundations of supramolecular chemistry, for which Cram, Lehn and Pedersen won the 1987 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Yet, despite substantial advances in chemistry and material science, human-made stimuli-responsive materials still pale in comparison to those found in nature. In this project, the ChemInFlow group at the University of Barcelona (UB, Spain), the SIMTECH Lab at the University of Porto (UPORTO, Portugal) and the Multi-Scale Robotics Lab at the ETH Zürich (Switzerland) will develop a new generation of active systems to upgrade the ability to do tissue engineering and regenerative medicine.
We are looking for a highly motivated candidate interested in pursuing an interdisciplinary project linking chemistry, material science, engineering and electromagnetism. Through a series of research stays (or secondments) at the University of Barcelona, University of Porto and ETH Zürich, the successful candidate will develop microfluidic-based devices to enable an unprecedented control in the generation of stimuli-responsive materials. The candidate will use microfluidic technologies together with electromagnetic manipulation to investigate strategies for magnetically controlling the arrangement and orientation of functional particles during the generation of active materials. The candidate will study how to leverage the properties, arrangement and orientation of these particles to develop active systems that can be used for cell growth stimulation (e.g. of bone cells). Building on this, the candidate will explore different avenues for possible applications in tissue engineering and regenerative approaches.
OTHER RELEVANT WEBSITES
Simulation Technologies Laboratory (SIMTECH Lab) is a research laboratory in the Transport Phenomena Research Centre, in the Engineering Faculty of Porto University (CEFT/FEUP), Portugal.
The Multi-Scale Robotics Lab (MSRL) pursues a dynamic research program that maintains a strong robotics research focus on several emerging areas of science and technology