Symposium: Bioinspired Ceramics and Composites

Scope of the Symposium:
Living organisms are able to grow mineralized tissues with remarkable multiscale architectures and properties using sustainable processes and building blocks. Design principles underlying the architecture of these biological materials reveal new pathways to produce ceramics and ceramic-based composites with unprecedented properties or that fulfill application needs using environmental-friendly processes and chemistries. This has led to exciting research aimed at better understanding structure-property relationships in natural materials and at devising processing routes that could enable the replication of key biological design principles in synthetic materials. The goal of this symposium is to foster the dialogue between the ceramic community and researchers active in the area of bioinspired materials to discuss further possible avenues that can be pursued in this exciting interdisciplinary field.

Abstracts will be solicited in (but not limited to) the following areas:

• Bioinspired materials and composites
• Multiscale modeling of biological materials
• Processes and products inspired by nature
• 3D Printing and additive manufacturing
• Correlated microscopy and spectroscopic techniques
• Scattering techniques applied to multiscale materials
• Applications of bioinspired materials
• Mechanical properties of bioinspired materials
• Characterisation of natural materials
• BIomineralization

Symposium Organizers:

• Chairman: Prof. Dr. André R. Studart
  • ETH Zurich, Switzerland
  • E-mail: [email protected]
• Chairman: Prof. Dr. Eduardo Saiz
  • Imperial College London, UK
  • E-mail: [email protected]
• Chairman: Dr. Rafael Libanori
  • ETH Zurich, Switzerland
  • E-mail: [email protected]

List of confirmed invited speakers:

• Dr. Sylvain Deville (CNRS/Saint Gobain, France)
• Prof. Hao Bai (Zhejiang University, China)
• Prof. Nima Rahbar (Worcester Polytechnic Institute, USA)
• Prof. Boaz Pokroy (Israel Institute of Technology, Israel)
• Dr. Raul Bermejo (Montanuniversität Leoben, Austria)
• Dr. Hortense Le Ferrand (Nanyang Technologial University, Singapore)
• Dr. Rafael Libanori (ETH Zurich)
• Dr. Florian Bouville (ETH Zurich)
• Prof. Ali Miserez (Nanyang Technologial University, Singapore)
• Prof. Victoria Garcia-Rocha (Cardiff University, UK)
• Prof. Shu-Hong Yu (University of Science and Technology of China, China)
• Prof. Marc Meyers (University of California, San Diego, USA)
• Dr. Federico Bosia (University of Turin, Italy)

Organizers information:

	André R. Studart André R. Studart is Associate Professor for Complex Materials at ETH Zurich, Switzerland. He obtained his BSc and PhD degrees in Materials Science and Engineering from the Federal University of São Carlos, Brazil. Before his faculty appointment, André worked as post-doctoral fellow at ETH Zurich and Harvard University. He is currently Director of the ETH Zurich Competence Centre for Materials and Processes. Research in his group covers a wide range of interdisciplinary topics, including soft matter, bioinspired materials, microfluidics, additive manufacturing and functional materials.
	Eduardo Saiz Eduardo Saiz joined Imperial College in October 2009 where he is currently the director for the Centre for Advanced Structural Ceramics. He received his PhD from the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid in 1992. His PhD project was carried out at the Instituto de Cerámica y Vidrio – CSIC. In 1992 he joined Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (USA) with a Fulbright fellowship and remained there as a staff scientist until 2009. In Berkeley he worked in the fields of high temperature capillarity, joining, composites and biomaterials. His research interests include the development of new processing techniques for the fabrication of ceramic-based composites, in particular hierarchical composites with bioinspired architectures, the study of high temperature interfacial phenomena such as spreading, the fabrication of graphene-based structures and composites and the development of new materials to support bone tissue engineering.
	Rafael Libanori Rafael Libanori is senior researcher at the Laboratory for Complex Materials at ETH Zurich, Switzerland. After obtaining his bachelor and master degrees from the Federal University of São Carlos, Brazil, he moved to Switzerland to start his PhD thesis on bio-inspired composites. In 2016, he joined Prof. Messersmith’s lab at University of California, Berkeley, where he worked as a postdoctoral fellow. Currently, his research is focused on the design of multifunctional polymers for bio-inspired composites.