Last week IBEC’s PhD students headed off to Mas Colltort in Sant Feliu de Pallarols for the first ever IBEC PhD retreat.The two-day sojourn in the country was a chance for more than 50 of IBEC’s students to hear talks by various speakers, give flash presentations about their career paths, and get to know one another.
Yesterday’s 11th IBEC Symposium closed with the bestowing of IBEC Doctoral Certificates of Excellence on two PhD fellows, the first time the recognition has been awarded since the initiative’s inception in 2017.Maria Valls from the Biomimetic Systems for Cell Engineering group and Berta Gumi from Nanoprobes and Nanoswitches were the students who achieved the certificates, which are in recognition of outstanding performance during the PhD at IBEC.
Tueday 2nd October will see the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia’s 11th Annual Symposium take place at Barcelona’s AXA Auditoritum, the first symposium in the insitute’s second decade of activity.Focusing this year on the topic of Bioengineering for Regenerative Therapies – one of IBEC’s three areas of application, with its expertise in 3D bioprinting, biomaterials, nanomedicine, stem cells and biomechanics – the symposium will welcome expert speakers in tissue engineering and regeneration from all over the world.
Artist Miguel Bustos was a finalist in a prestigious illustration prize for his work last year on IBEC’s Anniversary Book, ’10 anys d’impacte’.The 16th edition of the Premis Junceda of the Associació Professional d’il·lustradors de Catalunya saw Miguel up against four other finalists for a prize in the ‘non-fiction book for adults or children’ section. The jury of illustrators is made up of winners of previous calls and personalities from the world of visual communication.
On Monday IBEC junior group leader Nuria Montserrat and senior researcher Aranzazu Villasante were two of the researchers awarded funding at the Asociación Española de Investigación sobre el Cáncer (AECC)’s ceremony in Madrid.The AECC has bestowed 160 grants on cancer researchers during the past year, a total of €17.6m. The association made the official presentations of these awards at an event presided over by Her Majesty Queen Letizia on World Cancer Research Day, 24th September 2018.
A University of Barcelona master programme in which IBEC participates has been awarded the EIT Label, a certificate of quality for master and doctoral programmes, from EIT Health.The Master of Technological Innovation in Health (MTIH), led by Sorbonne University, has achieved the EIT Label for its excellent scientific education coupled with innovation and entrepreneurship training. IBEC’s role in the degree programme includes the active participation of students, as well as the innovative technology for health being developed by IBEC’s researchers, many of whom teach on the programme.
Implemented by a consortium of five universities in France, Spain and Portugal, the MTIH provides ‘active learning’ methods and supports student mobility, and new teaching content is being added to strengthen students’ innovation and entrepreneurship expertise.
Eight IBECers were in the Netherlands on 13th and 14th September for the first ever IBEC-ICMS Symposium, ‘NanoSens&Med’.The event aimed to identify synergies and potential for collaboration between IBEC groups and the researchers of the Institute for Complex Molecular Systems (ICMS), a research institute of the Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e).
Two IBEC group leaders, Vito Conte and Lorenzo Albertazzi, already have dual appointments with ICMS. They opened the symposium by welcoming all participants from the two institutions and presented their research, as did Eduard Torrents, Elena Martinez, Silvia Muro, Nuria Montserrat, Samuel Sanchez and director Josep Samitier, who also introduced IBEC.
The start of the autumn semester finds a new face in IBEC’s research community, with Dr. Benedetta Bolognesi joining the institute as junior group leader.Benedetta has come from Barcelona’s Centre for Genomic Regulation, where she was a postdoc in Ben Lehner’s and Gian Gaetano Tartaglia’s groups. At IBEC she will launch and lead the Protein Phase Transitions in Health and Disease group.
During her postdoc, Benedetta focused on why certain genes are toxic when over-expressed. She found that, in some cases, they cause toxicity because the proteins they code for end up forming a different liquid phase in the cytoplasm.
Today IBEC welcomed the new Director General of Research, Development, and Innovation of the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (MINECO) to meet some of the group leaders and hear about their research.Dr. Teresa Riesgo Alcaide met IBEC’s directors and was taken on a tour of the laboratories of Samuel Sánchez, Josep Samitier, Xavier Trepat and Elena Martínez, as well as viewing IBEC’s 3D bioprinting facilities.
Dr. Riesgo was in town for the EIT Health Partner Assembly at Caixa Forum, an important event on the calendar for the network.
IBEC is celebrating its sixth Caixaimpulse success, with Eduard Torrents’ project ‘BiofilmChip: personalized treatment for biofilm infections’ winning support in the programme’s fourth round.Working in collaboration with Josep Samitier’s Nanobioengineering group, BiofilmChip will develop an easy-to-use device that allows biofilm-forming bacteria to be grown in vitro, enabling clinicians to evaluate the efficency of various antibiotics and determine the best individualized treatment for biofilm-infected patients. 20 projects from all over Spain and Portugal were awarded in this fourth round, selected from a total of 85 submissions.