Universidad de Zaragoza – UZ
The University of Zaragoza (UZ) is the only public University of the Autonomous Region of Aragón, Spain and one of the oldest in Spain, created in 1542. Today has over 30,000 students and over 3000 research and teaching staff. The Aragón Institute of Engineering Research (I3A) is one of the research institutes of the UZ. Composed of more than 30 research groups and over 250 researchers, it is one of the biggest and more recognized research institutes in Engineering in Spain. Inside the I3A Division of Biomedical Engineering, the group of Applied Mechanics and Engineering (AMB) is considered one of the groups of excellence in Bioengineering in Spain and, as such, was one (under the name GEMM) of those chosen by an international commission to be part of the National Research Center on Bioengineering, Biomaterials and Nanomedicine (CIBER-BBN), the center of excellence in Spain on these topics. The AMB group has a large experience in participating in national and international research projects in the fields of modelling and simulation of continuous systems, with applications in tissue mechanics (bone, cartilage, ligaments and tendons, heart, blood vessels, eye, …), biological systems (remodelling, growth, morphogenesis, …), tissue engineering (scaffolds design, functionalization, de and recellularization, …), and, finally, cell processes (microfluidics, cell migration and differentiation, organ on chip, …). The I3A and the AMB group count not only with the hardware and software capabilities and experience (FEA, meshless, optimization, …) to afford these problems but also with a complete lab (mechanical testing, cell culture, bioreactors, microfluidic production and scaffold characterization) to validate the proposed models and to get the relevant parameters to feed those models.
Ignacio Ochoa
Ignacio Ochoa is the head of the Tissue Microenvironment Lab (TME LAB) and coordinator of the program of Technologies and innovation applied to the health of the same institute.
His current research goals are focused on understanding the role of the microenvironment in the progression of several tumors and cardiovascular diseases as well as on the development of microfluidic devices for cell culture applications (Organ on Chips).
He is co-founder of BEONCHIP SL, a company dedicated to the development and commercialization of microfluidic devices for organ-on-chip applications, and founding partner of EBERS Medical Technology, a company dedicated to the development and commercialization of equipment for tissue engineering and organ transplantation.
In 2015, he started as an assistant professor in the Department of Human Anatomy and Histology at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Zaragoza. He also belongs to the Aragon Institute of Engineering Research (I3A) and the Spanish excellence network CIBER BBN.
Ignacio received his Bachelor’s degree in Biology and Biochemistry from the University of Navarra in 1999 and 2003, respectively. He completed his Ph.D. in the Department of Histology and Pathology of this same university in 2004. After that, he started his postdoctoral stage in the group of Structural Mechanics and Materials Modeling (GEMM) at the University of Zaragoza, where he studied how the cellular behavior was conditioned by the mechanical environment in a micro (microfluidics) and macroscale (tissue engineering).
