Aldo Boccaccini is Chair and Professor for Biomaterials at the Department of Materials Science, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany. Until October 2009 he was Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Imperial College London, UK, Department of Materials, where he is now Visiting Professor of Materials. Prof. Boccaccini holds an MSc (Nuclear Engineering) from Instituto Balseiro (Argentina), PhD (Dr-Ing.) from Aachen University of Technology (Germany) and Habilitation from Ilmenau University of Technology (Germany). Previously, he had appointments at the University of Birmingham (UK), the University of California at San Diego (USA) and the Ilmenau University of Technology (Germany).
Prof. Boccaccini leads a multidisciplinary research group composed of 14 PhD students and several post-doctoral researchers, visiting students and academic visitors. He is also associated with the Composites Centre and the UK Structural Ceramics Centre at Imperial College London. The research activities of Prof. Boccaccini are in the broad area of glasses, ceramics and polymer/glass composites for biomedical, functional, and/or structural applications. He is the author or co-author of more than 370 scientific papers and 15 book chapters.
Prof. Boccaccini has pioneered the use of electrophoretic deposition for production of nanostructured materials and composites, including carbon nanotube containing composites. In the last few years he has developed extensive research activities in the area of scaffold materials for tissue engineering applications and has pioneered the development of novel highly porous bioactive and degradable composite scaffolds with nanostructured surface topography. The addition of a bioactive component, for example tailored compositions of bioactive glasses, is seen as a significant improvement towards clinical applications (third-generation biomaterials) due to the possibility of tuning the degradation rate, mechanical properties and biological response of the scaffold.
His achievements in the area of materials science have been recognized with the award of the Materials Science and Technology Prize 2003 by the Federation of European Materials Society (FEMS) and the Verulam Medal and Prize 2003 of the Institute of Materials Minerals and Mining (IOM3). He has been elected Fellow of the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining of the UK. In addition to his research and teaching activities, he was the Chair of the London Materials Society (2005-2006) and he was named an Ambassador of Imperial College London. Prof. Boccaccini is a member of the EU chapter of the Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine International Society (TERMIS) and serves in the editorial board of several recognized international journals including Journal of Materials Science, Materials Letters, J. Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine, J. Biomaterials Applications, Advanced Engineering Materials, Advances in Applied Ceramics and J. Mater. Processing Technology. He is the founder of the successful International Conferences Series on Electrophoretic Deposition and he was the Chairman of the three conferences of the series held so far in Canada (2002), Italy (2005) and Japan (2008). He will serve as chairman of the next EPD conference, to be held in Mexico (2011). Prof. Boccaccini was recently co-chair of the EUROMAT 2009 conference, the largest Materials conference in Europe, held in Glasgow, UK, in September 2009. From January 2010 is Professor Boccaccini the editor-in-chief of the international journal Materials Letters (Elsevier).
A note regarding the farewell to Prof. Boccaccini, as Ambassador of Imperial College, when he left Imperial recently, is posted in this site.
