Keynote Speakers
Enabling in silico trials based on modelling, simulation, and big data
Professor Blanca Rodriguez
Professor of Computational Medicine
Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow
Fellow at St Cross College,
Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford, UK
Professor Blanca Rodriguez is Professor of Computational Medicine, Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow and Head of the Computational Biology and Health Informatics Theme at the Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford. She leads the Computational Cardiovascular Science team (www.cs.ox.ac.uk/ccs), with a key focus on career development, and interdisciplinary, intersectoral collaborations. She is interested in novel, interdisciplinary approaches to accelerate therapy development, and replace animal testing. Blanca is from Valencia, Spain, where she trained in Engineering, and later as a postdoc in the USA. She then joined Oxford, holding personal research fellowships since 2007 and a professorship since 2014. She has three children and loves swimming, yoga, food and travelling amongst many other things.
3D Modeling of the Intervertebral Disc: direct relationships between tissue composition and model parameters
Professor Grace O’Connell
Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering
Associate Dean for Inclusive Excellence, College of Engineering
University of California, Berkeley, USA
Grace O’Connell is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the co-director of the Berkeley Biomechanics Laboratory, and her research interests are in soft tissue mechanobiology and tissue engineering. O’Connell received PhD in Bioengineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 2009, where her research focused on intervertebral disc biomechanics with age, degeneration, and injury. O’Connell’s research group employs computational modeling and experimental approaches to study the effect of aging and disease on tissue- and joint-level mechanobiology. She has received many awards including the 2019 YC Fung Young Investigator Award and NSF CAREER Award, and was inducted into the AIMBE College of Fellows in 2021. She is also the Associate Dean for Inclusive Excellence for the College of Engineering.
Invasion in cancer organoids as the result of a mechanobiological instability
Professor Marino Arroyo
Professor of Computational Mechanics
Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain
Marino Arroyo obtained a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Northwestern University in 2003. After a postdoctoral stay at Caltech, he joined the UPC in 2005, where he is full professor since 2017. He is also an Associated Researcher at the Institute of Bioengineering of Catalunya (IBEC) and at the International Center for Numerical Methods in Engineering (CIMNE). His current work is at the interface between mathematical and computational modeling, engineering and mechanobiology. He has received the Zienkiewicz Young Scientist Award by ECCOMAS and is a fellow of IACM (2020). He obtained an ERC Starting grant in 2009 and a Consolidator grant in 2016. He has advised 11 completed PhD theses and 12 postdoctoral researchers.
