Kick-off meeting of new EFI funded project “Novel hydrogels for understanding complex tissue biomechanics”
The kick-off meeting of the new collaborative research project “Novel Biopolymer Hydrogels for Understanding Complex Tissue Biomechanics” took place on 29th March 2019 at The Institute of Applied Mechanics (LTM), hosted by Prof. Paul Steinmann and Dr. Silvia Budday. This is a new research project funded by the “Emerging Fields Initiative” (EFI) of the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg involving, in addition to the Institute of Applied Mechanics, the Biophysics Group led by Prof. Ben Fabry, the Institute for Functional and Clinical Anatomy, led by Prof. Dr. med. Friedrich Paulsen and the Institute of Biomaterials led by Prof. Aldo R. Boccaccini. The project will provide a new perspective to characterize biological tissues according to their mechanical behavior and to identify biofabricated tissue mimicking biomaterials with similar properties to natural tissues to reduce challenges related to experimental characterization of living tissues. The project will also develop appropriate mathematical models to computationally predict the tissue response based on a variety of novel (soft) biomaterials. (Photo: participants at the Kick-off meeting on 29th March 2019).