Best Poster Presentation Award at Future Investigators of Regenerative Medicine (FIRM) Symposium 2018
Congratulations to Juan Aviles Milan who presented his work on Making cartilage one drop at a time: harnessing droplet microfluidics for cartilage tissue engineering.
Future Investigators of Regenerative Medicine 2018 – “Bench to Bedside” PhD Symposium
Future Investigators of Regenerative Medicine (FIRM) is a symposium organised by young researchers for young researchers. A key aim of the symposium is to encourage young researchers get to know each other within a friendly and informal setting and thus establish an international network early on in their careers. The FIRM Symposium showcased the latest advances in regenerative medicine research undertaken worldwide and provided a wonderful platform on which to build collaborations.
For the last few years, members of Bone and Joint Research Group, within Human Development and Health, have been part of the organising committee – with this year’s committee comprising Michael Glinka (Bone and Joint Group, University of Southampton), James Kusena (Loughborough University), Rabea Loczenski (University of Nottingham) and Gastón Augustin Primo (Queen Mary University of London).
This year’s theme was “From Bench to Bedside – How to move your research towards commercialisation” lead by fantastic keynote and workshop speakers who helped the delegates on the journey from research in academia towards industry. This year’s keynote speakers included:
Prof Matteo Santin (University of Brighton), Dr Andrea Sass (Julius Wolff Institute, Charite), Prof Pedro Morouço (Polytechnic Institute of Leira), Prof Elisabeth Engel (Technical University of Catalonia), Prof Tim Woodfield (University of Otago) and Dr Sebastian Knöbel (Miltenyi Biotec) – leaders in biotechnology and regenerative medicine.
Workshops, led by Dr Mark McCall, Dr Karen Coopman and Dr Thomas Heathman, over the course of the meeting informed delegates on product design, cost basis and manufacturing with delegates then presenting in form of “Dragon’s Den” – judged by the panel.
The Bone and Joint Research Group remain central to the organisation of FIRM meetings and FIRM 2019 sees the trend continuing – Juan Aviles Milan will take a central role in the organisation of next year’s meeting!