Plenary session

Keynote Speakers

Monday 28th

Prof. Francesco Migliavacca, Department of Chemistry, Materials and Chemical Engineering ‘Giulio Natta’, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy.

Francesco Migliavacca obtained a MSc in Mechanical Engineering and a PhD in Bioengineering both from Politecnico di Milano. He worked as a Research Assistant at the Cardiothoracic Unit of Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children in London in 1994 and 1997-99. In 2000 and 2001 he was consultant and Research Scientist at the Pediatric Cardiac Surgery Department of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA. At present, he is a Professor of Bioengineering and the Deputy Head of the Department of Chemistry, Materials and Chemical Engineering ‘Giulio Natta’ of Politecnico di Milano. His major research activities have included the fluid dynamic optimization of pediatric cardiac surgery procedures, fluid dynamics in the living systems as well as structural analysis and material behavior of biomedical devices, in particular intravascular stents and percutaneous valves. He received the medal 'Le Scienze 2001' in Engineering and was awarded the European Society of Biomechanics Perren Award in 2004.

* Abstract: "How to predict responses to therapeutic actions with digital twins: application to cardiovascular diseases"

Tuesday 29th

Prof. Abdul Barakat, Hydrodynamics Laboratory, Department of Mechanics, Ecole Polytechnique, France.

Abdul Barakat is CNRS Director of Research at the Laboratoire d’Hydrodynamique de l’Ecole Polytechnique (LadHyX) and the AXA Professor of Mechanics and Biology at Ecole Polytechnique. He is also co-director of the Institut Polytechnique de Paris Engineering for Health (E4H) Interdisciplinary Research Center and an adjunct professor of Biomedical Engineering at Duke University. Abdul Barakat obtained a Ph.D. in biofluid mechanics from MIT in 1994. He subsequently spent a year as an NIH Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago. In 1995, he was recruited as Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of California, Davis (UC Davis). He was promoted to Associate Professor in 2001 and to Full Professor in 2006. At UC Davis, he was also on the faculty of the Biomedical Engineering, Biophysics, and Applied Mathematics graduate programs. He relocated to France in 2010. In 2014, Abdul Barakat co-founded the startup company Sensome, which develops state-of-the-art sensor technologies to equip medical devices. He is a recipient of a Pfizer-Parke Davis Atorvastatin Research Award (2001), a permanently endowed Chair from the AXA Research Fund (2010), and the Eugenio Beltrami Senior Scientist Prize from the International Research Center on Mathematics and Mechanics of Complex Systems (2020). He is also an elected Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (2014). His research interests are in vascular biomechanics and bioengineering, cellular mechanobiology, and endovascular devices.

Abstract:

* Abstract "Regulation of Cell Shape and Migration by Substrate Topography: Mechanisms and Implications"