Laura Baumgartner is a PhD student at BCN MedTech, who is developing her PhD thesis in computational biomechanics and mechanobiology under the supervision of Jérôme Noailly and Miguel Ángel González Ballester. Her PhD thesis is focused in modeling the interaction of chronic nutritional stress and local mechanical loads to describe crucial pathways leading to microtrauma development within the intervertebral disc (IVD).

In the last months she has been awarded three different grants that will allow her attending several international conferences and move to the ETH Zurich for a period of four months to complement her theoretical research with cell culture experiments.

In June, Laura won the VPHi (Virtual Physiological Human Institute) Best Poster Award at the 3rd VPH Summer School that took place at UPF, with her poster entitled “Combining systems biology and multiphysics computational models to explore the emergence of mechanical microtrauma in the intervertebral disc”. This award consists in a 1.000 € grant for the participation in scientific conferences or workshop from September 2018 to December 2019. 

In July, Laura was also awarded the ESB (European Society of Biomechanics) Mobility award with her proposal entitled “computational modelling over multiple scales to simulate microtrauma emergence within the intervertebral disc”. This award was announced during the 8th World Congress of Biomechanics in Dublin and will allow Laura moving from UPF to ETH Zurich for  a period of four months, to work in the group of Prof. Karin Wuertz-Kozak. This international research stay will  allow her doing in-vitro cell experiments to measure the behavior of  IVD cells under the influence of biochemical stimuli (oxygen, lactate and glucose) and biomechanical loads (magnitude, amplitude and load duration). The results will be used as inputs and evidences for validation, for the intervertebral disc computational systems biology model, that Laura is developing at UPF.

She has also recently won the IRCOBI (International Research Council on Biomechanics of Injury) travel grant of a value of 630 € to go the IRCOBI conference in Athens in September 2018, where her work has been accepted for an oral presentation, and will be published in the conference proceedings.

Congratulations Laura!