Prof. Pamela Habibovic

Pamela Habibovic obtained her PhD degree in 2005 from the University of Twente. In 2006, she worked as post-doctoral research fellow at Children’s Hospital Boston-Harvard Medical School and in 2007 she spent a year as post-doctoral research fellow at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. From 2008 until 2014 she led a research group at the University of Twente, first as assistant and later as associate professor. In 2014, she moved to Maastricht University, where she became Full Professor of Inorganic Biomaterials and where she cofounded MERLN Institute for Technology-Inspired Regenerative Medicine. Currently, she is the Scientific Director of the institute and she chairs the Department of Instructive Biomaterials Engineering. The main focus of her research group is on synthetic bone graft substitutes, bioinorganics, nanomaterials for theranostics in regenerative medicine and high-throughput approaches in biomaterials research. For her research she received prestigious Veni, Vidi, Aspasia and Gravitation grants of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research among other external research funds. Since 2013, she serves as a council member of the European Society for Biomaterials (ESB), and since 2017 she holds the role of the ESB President. Habibovic is an Associate Editor of the RSC journal Biomaterials Science and an editorial board member of the journals Acta Biomaterialia, Journal of Materials Science: Materials in Medicine, Advanced Biomaterials and Devices in Medicine, Regenerative Biomaterials, Biomedical Engineering and Biomaterials Research. She has published over 80 peer-review articles on the topic of biomaterials and regenerative medicine. In 2013, she received the Jean Leray Award of the European Society for Biomaterials.

Abstract
Regeneration can be described as the body’s intrinsic capacity to repair damaged and diseased organs and tissue and restore their normal function. In the case of severe damage, or when the patient suffers from, for example, a chronic disease, this capacity is often insufficient and an intervention is needed to trigger and help to body in the process of regeneration. Approaches to do so belong to the field of regenerative medicine. 
At MERLN Institute for Technology-Inspired Regenerative Medicine we develop regenerative strategies for a variety of clinical applications, including, for example, orthopedics, cardiovascular surgery and ophthalmology. These strategies are developed by combining knowledge and tools from the fields of biology, chemistry, materials science and (micro- and nano)engineering. In this lecture, examples of project we are working on will be presented, with emphasis on (technological) platforms that may also be applicable in the field of neuroscience and may open possibilities for collaboration.