Jerôme Noailly

Jérôme Noailly is Full Professor at the Department of Engineering of the Pompeu Fabra University (UPF), where is is the co-director of the SIMBIOsys groups and leads the lab of Biomechanics & Mechanobiology (BMMB) of the Barcelona Centre for New Medical Technologies (BCN MedTech).

He holds a bachelor’s degree in physical chemistry, an Engineer’s and a master’s degree in Material Science, and a master’s degree in Acoustics. In 2002, he started a PhD on spine computational biomechanics at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona (UPC), Spain, focussing on theoretical approximations in finite element modelling. In 2006, he was awarded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship (MECNOR-518768) and worked in computational mechanobiology for cartilage tissue engineering at the AO Foundation (Davos, Switzerland) and at the Eindhoven University of Technology (The Netherlands). In 2009, he went back to Barcelona with a Marie Skłodowska-Curie reintegration grant (SEVBIOM-249210) and retook spine modelling activities at the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC), Barcelona, Spain. In 2010, he co-led the European research proposal My Spine (FP7-269909), which was funded, and of which he eventually became principal investigator (PI). In 2012, he took the lead of the Biomechanics and Mechanobiology group at IBEC, and he seized the opportunity to expand the research of the group to the field of computational systems biology, for the European project, The Grail (FP7-278557).

In 2015, Jérôme relocated at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF), in his quality as PI of the Multiscale and Computational Biomechanics and Mechanobiology (MBIOMM) group (2014-SGR-1616) that merged in, and contributed to the growth of the UPF SIMBIOSys group, at UPF. As synergies grew within SIMBIOSys, Jérôme took the oportunity to include medical image analysis and machine learning components to his research. At the same time, he was consolidating the integration of computational systems biology approaches for multiscale explorations of tissues and organs. In 2016, he was awarded a Ramon y Cajal fellowship (RYC-2015-18888) from the Spanish government, and in 2019, he became Tenure-Track Associate Professor at DTIC, where he was eventually promoted to Full Professor, in 2023. He was the Coordinator of the European project Disc4All (H2020-IT-ETN-955735) (2020-2025), and he is recipient of the current European Research Council Consolidator Grant O-Health (ERC-CoG-101044828) for in silico medicine developments in highlighly multifactorial diseases and disorders through modular systems modelling. Beside research, Jérôme is involved in different technology transfer projects in precision clinical biomechanics and regenerative medicine, where he is has been leading several competitive projects with partner companies, and two projects to spin-off the technology of his own lab.

He has been supervising 19 PhD theses, and he has 180+ contributions to congresses and 66+ articles in international journals. Internationally, he has served as a member Council of the European Society of Biomechanics (ESB), from 2016 to 2024, having been successively the Treasurer, and the Vice-President of the society, between 2020 and 2024. He is also a past president of the National Spanish Chapter of the ESB, he has co-funded the Student Committee the Virtual Physiological Human Institute (VPHi) that he has chaired for 10 years. Jérôme also served on the very first Executive Committee of the Society of In Silico Medicine (former VPHi), in his quality as an elected member, and he is now member of the World Council of Biomechanics, with the mandate to host the next World Congress of Biomechanics in Barcelona, in 2030, as Chair of the event.