Institutional news

Yesterday IBEC welcomed Prof. Edvard Moser, Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology 2014, as the keynote speaker in a special event to mark the move of ICREA professor and ERC grantee Prof. Paul Verschure to the institute.

During the event entitled “From the Science of Memory to the Future of Neuroengineering”, held at Palau Macaya and supported by Obra Social “La Caixa”, Prof. Moser talked about his pioneering work into the basic neural computations that underlie cognition and behavior –

IBEC will welcome no fewer than three new PhD students with fellowships from the “la Caixa” Foundation’s new Inphinit programme, placing the institute fourth among the 28 centres that were chosen.

The doctoral fellowship programme, which aims to attract international early-stage researchers to the top Spanish research centres – namely the MINECO-selected Severo Ochoa centres and Maria de Maeztu units of excellence, and the Spanish Ministry of Health’s Carlos III centres of excellence – closed its first call in February this year.

It attracted 438 applications for the 57 positions, which are co-funded by the European Commission through COFUND, one of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie initiatives of the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme.

IBEC’s Biomaterials for Regenerative Therapies group leader Elisabeth Engel was one of five scientific guests to take part in a round table session at yesterday’s annual general assembly of Barcelona Global at the PRBB.

Moderated by Barcelona Supercomputing Centre’s associated director Josep Maria Martorell, the session, “Barcelona on the Frontiers of Science”, looked at how Barcelona research is pushing global science forward, discussing advances and collaboration initiatives in emerging areas such as 3D printing.

For the second year, IBEC is taking part in the Barcelona International Youth Science Challenge (BIYSC 2017), an initiative organized by the Catalunya-La Pedrera Foundation to stimulate scientific talent among young people from all over the world.

This year’s BIYSC will be launched tonight at La Pedrera in a ceremony which includes a talk by IBEC group leader and ICREA research professor Samuel Sánchez.

IBEC and Hospital Clinic have joined forces in 3D bioprinting applied to cancer diagnostics to win funding from Caixaimpulse.

Core Facilities’ Mateu Pla Roca is the fifth IBEC researcher to win funding from the programme, an initiative of Obra Social “la Caixa” with Caixa Capital Risc, which aims to promote technology transfer in science. His project, “3D bioprinted array tissue-like cores: tissue-like controls for cancer diagnostics” (3DBIOcores), will be carried out in collaboration with Antoni Martinez, head of the histopathology service at Hospital Clinic.

The Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC) gains a world-renowned neuroscientist and psychologist with the move this week of ICREA professor Paul Verschure and his Synthetic Perceptive, Emotive and Cognitive Systems group (SPECS) from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra to the institute.

A multidisciplinary group founded in 2005, SPECS aims to find a unified theory of mind, brain and body by using synthetic methods, and to apply such a theory to the development of new cognitive technologies. It’s led by ICREA professor and ERC grantee Paul Verschure, who has an MA and PhD in psychology and who has pursued his research in the USA (San Diego Neurosciences Institute and the Salk Institute) and Europe (University of Amsterdam, University of Zurich and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology).

The Board of Trustees of the Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology (BIST), presided over by Andreu Mas-Colell, ​​has approved the incorporation of IBEC as a new member.

IBEC will bring its expertise and excellent research in the confluence between biology and engineering to BIST, an initiative of six of Catalonia’s research centers of excellence – the Center for Genomic Regulation (CRG), the Institute of Photonic Sciences (ICFO), the Institute of Chemical Research of Catalonia (ICIQ), the Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (ICN2), the Institute of High Energy Physics (IFAE), and the Institute of Biomedical Research of Barcelona (IRB Barcelona) – to increase their levels of collaboration and build a joint scientific project together. BIST’s strength is based on the research capacity of its centers and its potential to promote cutting-edge research projects in multidisciplinary research.

Nanoprobes and Nanoswitches postdoc Miquel Bosch is one of just six Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions fellows to be invited by the European Commission to participate in the annual ECSITE Conference 2017.

Taking place in Porto this week, the conference is the largest in Europe devoted to communicating science, attracting more than 1000 people. Miquel has been specially selected, along with five other MSCA fellows from all over Europe – out of a total of more than 100,000 – to take part at their stand at the event, where he will explain his research in a visual and attractive way, “Shedding light upon the brain”.

2017 sees the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC) celebrate its first ten years of research activity, with this week’s 10th Anniversary Symposium kicking off the celebrations.

It’s been a hair-raisingly fast climb up to the near top of the tree of centres in the Catalan research arena, with IBEC already holding its own alongside bigger and more established organizations for scientific output, number of ERC grants, patents, spin-offs, training programmes, national or EU-level stamps and endorsements, and other important indicators.

IBEC has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the EF Clif, the European Foundation for the Study of Chronic Liver Failure.

The five-year agreement will enable the two organizations to share staff and knowledge, apply for funding together and otherwise collaborate with the goal of improving knowledge of the mechanisms of chronic liver failure and increasing survival rates for patients.