Biomaterials

Mohan Edirisinghe, holds the Bonfield Chair of Biomaterials, within the Mechanical Engineering Department at University College London. He has published 600 journal papers (H-index of 72 with over 19000 citations) and over a dozen key patents, given more than 125 invited/keynote lectures worldwide. He has supervised over 250 researchers including over 100 PhD graduations and he has been awarded grants to the value of £25 million, which have given him the opportunity to adventurously explore novel avenues of scaled-up forming of advanced materials for application in key areas such as healthcare. In 2015 was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineers in the UK. In 2020 he was elected a Fellow of the European Academy of Sciences and in 2021 he was appointed OBE (Order of the British Empire) for his services to Biomedical Engineering. He has won many awards for his research, in 2023 he was awarded two prizes: The RAEng Colin Campbell Mitchell Prize for his world-leading contribution to the industrial application of polymeric fibres by inventing novel fibre manufacturing vessels and processes, and The Royal Society Clifford Paterson Medal & Lecture Prize for his seminal research in engineering science of making small structures from soft matter in novel scalable ways, creating new frontiers in functional applications causing major advances in manufacturing and healthcare.

Merve Gultekinoglu, is an assistant professor at Hacettepe University in Ankara, Turkey, Department of Nanotechnology and Nanomedicine. Having studied BSc in Chemistry, she completed her MSc and PhD in the Department of Bioengineering at Hacettepe University. She completed her PhD in 2019 in the field of polymer synthesis and processing for fibre based-tissue scaffold manufacturing. Her research is in the field of biomaterials and tissue engineering with emphasis on polymer synthesis-modification, antibacterial systems, drug delivery systems, active targeting, tissue engineering and biofabrication techniques. In 2021, she won the Hacettepe University the Science Encouragement Award in the field of Medicine and Health. She is an active working group member of the European Union COST actions and focuses on new natural polymer classes and green synthesis methods in the fields of biomaterials and tissue engineering.

Jubair Ahmed, is a postdoctoral researcher at University College London. Having studied undergraduate Biochemistry at The University of Westminster, he went on to complete a MSc in Biomaterials & Tissue Engineering at University College London where he graduated top of his class, for which he was awarded the Armourers and Brasiers' Biomaterials Medal. Having completed his PhD in 2022, his research has focussed on the manufacturing of advanced into biomaterials which have various applications in biomedical engineering. To date, he has published 24 journal papers, with four journal front covers, a H-index of 11 and over 500 citations. His work has been published in leading journals such as in Biotechnology Advances and Langmuir. He believes that public engagement, especially via the use of non-conventional and modern mediums such as e-information sharing platforms and social media is the way forward in increasing public engagement in science.