Aldo R. BOCCACCINI is Professor of Biomaterials and Head of the Institute of Biomaterials at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany. He is visiting professor at Imperial College London, Department of Materials. His research focuses on the development and characterization of a great variety of biomaterials with special focus on bioactive materials for tissue engineering and drug delivery as well as antibacterial materials. A core expertise is in the design and application of bioactive glasses for developing scaffolds with angiogenic capability. In addition, his research group develops bioinks for 3D bioprinting and biofabrication. He is the author of more than 980 scientific papers and has co-edited 8 books. His work has been cited more than 52,000 times (h-index = 100, Scopus) and he was included in the “Highly Cited Researchers” lists in 2014 and 2018. 
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Ivan COLUZZA holds an Ikerbasque Professor Fellowship from the Basque Government and directs the Computational Biophysics lab at CIC biomaGUNE in San Sebastian, Spain. His research aims at bridging the gap between biology and material science using a reductionist approach based on statistical mechanics and computer modelling. Prof. Coluzza's demonstrated that directional interactions alone are the key for encoding a specific function in genetic code. This finding opened a new understanding of protein evolution and function and the creation of biomimetic systems. Prof. Coluzza recently patented smart-nanopores that, by mimicking chaperones, can refold denatured proteins.

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Hanna ISAKSSON is professor of biomechanics at the Department of Biomedical Engineering, Lund University, Sweden. Her research focuses on musculoskeletal tissue biomechanics and mechanobiology. Emphasis is on characterization of tissue structure, function, composition relationships over multiple lengthscales to understand tissue degeneration and regeneration aspects. Experimental material science-based techniques are used to understand tissue response and to provide critical data that can be used to develop and validate computational models, that jointly can lead to new understanding of the tissue response.

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Cristina SATRIANO is Associate Professor of Physical Chemistry at the Department of Chemical Sciences of Catania University, Italy. Her research activity focuses on the design, the synthesis, and the physicochemical characterization of multifunctional nanomaterials for theranostics and nanomedicine applications. Topics currently under investigation in her laboratory (Nano Hybrid BioInterfaces Lab) include peptide-decorated plasmonic nanoparticles with pro- or anti-angiogenic activity for wound healing or tumor therapy, respectively, and the plasmonic tuning of graphene-based nanosheets for triggered photothermal and self-cleaning properties in antibacterial and environmental use.

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