Since 2008, the ICREA Academy program’s goal is to boost and reward the excellence of research at the public universities of Catalonia. It focuses on forefront researchers who are in an active and expansive phase of their career and contributes to intensifying their research. Thirty researchers were recognized in the last call in 2020, including Professor Marino Arroyo.
Professor Marino Arroyo is an associated researcher at IBEC and member of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Mathematics Institute of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC)-BarcelonaTech (IMTech) of the UPC, where he leads the Mechanics of Soft and Living Interfaces laboratory from the Research program on Cell and Tissue Mechanobiology. His research goal is to develop mathematical and computational models to understand the mechanics of biological interfaces, cells and tissues, that is, the small-scale mechanics of materials and biological systems.
This is the third time Professor Marino Arroyo receives this award, the other two in 2008 and 2015. This new ICREA grant will support research related to the rational manipulation of active living materials and the engineering of new bionic and bioinspired materials, especially materials with extreme reversible deformability. Mechanical aspects of living organisms are a very relevant research field since it plays a crucial role in several biological phenomena, as the development of tumours in cancerous tissues and organs morphogenesis.
The ICREA Academy programme is funded by the Catalan Government with 5 million per year and grants selected renowned researchers, over a five-year period, with 40.000 EUR per year to boost their research activities. In 2020, the last call of this programme, 30 researchers from different Catalan universities have been awarded, over the 196 applications received. Since the creation of this programme in 2008, 274 researchers already benefited from these grants.
