People

Eric Rojas

Eric Rojas, Doctor in Engineering with a mention in Computing, whose research focuses on Clinical Informatics since his doctoral thesis in process mining in healthcare in 2017. He is currently also an academic in the Department of Clinical Laboratories of the Faculty of Medicine at the PUC and Leader of the Quality Assurance Area at the National Center for Health Information Systems.

His research area is health informatics. His research focuses on the application of process mining techniques in healthcare, which allows the study of both clinical and administrative processes that are supported by Information Systems. He has special interest in processes associated with Emergency Rooms and patient care processes using Telemedicine.

On the other hand, Professor Rojas also focuses on the development of Software Quality Assessments of Information Systems and the technologies used in Healthcare, among them, Telemedicine tools and Electronic Clinical Records, which allow their best implementation for patient care.

For more information about Dr. Rojas' research, visit his website here

René Botnar

Dr. Botnar received his PhD in technical sciences from the ETH Zurich. 

In 1997, he joined the Cardiac MR Center at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, which was one of the very first MR Centers specifically focused on cardiovascular MR. Under the leadership of Dr. Warren Manning, he developed non-invasive free-breathing coronary MR angiography as an alternative to invasive X-ray angiography, which is now available on all most MR scanners and is clinically being used for the detection of congenital heart disease and anomalous coronary arteries. In 2003 he was appointed to Scientific Director of the Cardiac MR Center and in 2004 to Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.  

In 2005, Dr. Botnar accepted a Professorship of Biomedical Imaging in the Nuclear Imaging Department at the Technische Universität München (TUM) where he worked closely with Radiology and Cardiology to facilitate clinical translation of cardiac MRI.

At the end of 2007, he joined the Division of Imaging Sciences and Biomedical Engineering at King’s College London where he was Chair of Cardiovascular Imaging and Head of the Biomedical Engineering Department and where he setup a cardiac MR program with a special focus on the development of novel MRI pulse sequences, image reconstruction, motion correction and quantitative imaging techniques for early diagnosis of cardiovascular disease in addition to pre-clinical and translational multi-modality imaging.

Dr. Botnar is a Fellow of the International Society of Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Medicine and the Society for Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance and was chair of the ISMRM (2021-22) and ESMI (2019-20) cardiac MR study group. He is an Associate Editor for the Journal of Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance and Molecular Imaging and Biology and has published more than 350 peer-reviewed original and review articles and holds 12 patents related to MRI technology.

Currently, he is the Director and Full Professor at the Institute of Biological and Medical Engineering of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (IIBM UC).

His research group at IIBM UC is working on the development of novel MRI pulse sequences, motion correction and quantitative imaging techniques, including artificial intelligence for early diagnosis of cardiovascular disease, as well as molecular MRI of atherosclerosis and myocardial infarction using new target-specific contrast agents (elastin, collagen, albumin, fibrin, macrophages, oxLDL). His research is funded by a Fondecyt Regular, and he is an investigator of the Millennium Institute of intelligent Healthcare Engineering (iHealth) https://i-health.cl/, Fondequip Mayor “Low-field MRI” and co-director of the Basal Centre “Interventional Medicine for Precision and Advanced Cellular Therapy (IMPACT)” https://bit.ly/3mcCmkl.   

Andreas Schüller

Associate Professor at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile with 10+ years of independent and post-doctoral research, teaching and mentoring experience at universities in Germany, Singapore, New York and Chile.

His lab is dedicated to deciphering the molecular code of protein-ligand interactions at an atomic level. His research is situated in the areas of bioinformatics and cheminformatics, where his lab develops new computational methods for predicting molecular binding events using concepts from structural biology, biochemistry, drug design, big data, machine learning, protein engineering and software engineering.

These computational methods are then applied in his research for the repositioning of drugs, the discovery of antifungal, anticancer and anticoagulant compounds, as well as the design of oligopeptides as modulators of the intestinal microbiota. 

For more information about Dr. Schüller's research visit his lab website here

Fernán Federici

Fernan studied two years of Engineering and three of Biology. He worked one year at the Alvarez-Buylla lab (UNAM) before moving to Cambridge to do a PhD in Biological Sciences at Jim Haseloff ´s lab. All his education has been kindly supported by the free educational system of Argentina and international scholarships from JP II Foundation and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. 

He is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology and in the Institute of Biological and Medical Engineering of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. He also works at the iBio Millennium Institute and OpenPlant. His group promotes open technologies for bioengineering, science and education; and the members of the group are part of the open technology movements GOSH, ReClone and TECNOx.

Francisco Melo

Professor Melo is a graduate and Master in Biochemistry from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile with 25 years of experience in the field of bioinformatics. Hedeveloped his doctorate at University Notre Dame de la Paix (1998, Belgium) and his postdoctoral stage at Rockefeller University (2000, USA). 

In 2000 he was incorporated as Professor at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, and currently, he is working as a full professor in the Department of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology. In 2020, Francisco joined the Institute of Biological and Medical Engineering in the same university.

His main research line is in the field of structural computational biology where he and his research group study the relation and interaction between the sequence-structure-function in macromolecules that govern the flow of genetic information in living systems (proteins, DNA and RNA). The techniques commonly used are the analysis and processing of large amounts of experimental data on computers, integrating the laws of physics, chemistry, statistical methods, and artificial intelligence.

Tobias Wenzel

 

Dr. Wenzel is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Biological and Medical Engineering of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (UC). He obtained his Masters degree (2013) and PhD (2017) from the University of Cambridge, Department of Physics, and performed postdoctoral research at the Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology at Cambridge until 2018. He then held an interdisciplinary Marie Curie Fellowship at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany, before joining the IIBM end of 2020.

Dr. Tobias Wenzel is a bioengineer studying human and environmental microbiomes by developing microfluidic methods for high-throughput multi-omics screens. The research of his lab focuses on in-vitro and single cell analysis (interactions, genomics, cultivation, phenotyping) by drawing on biophysics (self-organisation, micro-and nanostructuration, optics & photonics, modeling) and Open Source Hardware automation.

To learn more about professor Wenzel’s research visit his lab website here

Flavia Zacconi

Professor Zacconi is a graduate and Doctor in Chemistry from the Universidad Nacional del Sur, Argentina, where she worked as a teacher and researcher until 2012. Between 2009 and 2012 she developed both postdoctoral stages at Universidade de Santiago de Compostela (USC, Spain) and Institute of Organic Synthesis (ISO, Spain). In 2012 she was part of the STVP-UC Program for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (Stanford University, USA). Moreover, Prof. Zacconi was an invited professor at Boston College (2014-2015, Massachusetts, USA), University of Sussex (2019-2021, Sussex, UK) and University of Notre Dame (2020, Indiana, USA).

She is currently an Associate Professor at the Organic Chemistry Department of the Faculty of Chemistry and Pharmacy at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Since 2020 she is Associate Professor at the Institute of Biological and Medical Engineering UC (IIBM-UC). Furthermore, Prof. Zacconi is an Associate Member of the Research Center for Nanotechnology and Advanced Materials (CIEN-UC).

Flavia's research focuses on the intersections of organic chemistry, medicinal chemistry, engineering and biological chemistry, developing multi- and interdisciplinary research projects from the basic sciences to the applied science regarding the potential applications of these developments.

For more information about Dr. Zacconi research background visit her research group website here

Sebastián Aguayo

Dr. Aguayo is a Dentist (BDS) from the Faculty of Dentistry, Universidad de Concepción, Chile and has a PhD in Biomaterials from the Eastman Dental Institute, University College London (UCL), UK. His current line of research focuses on exploring the initial interactions between bacteria and surfaces within the context of biofilm formation, at both cellular and sub-cellular levels, utilizing a combination of traditional and nanoscale approaches.

Currently he is an Assistant Professor at the School of Dentistry and the Institute of Biological and Medical Engineering UC.

Vicente Parot

Vicente's research aims to advance the frontiers of imaging technology for biological and medical applications.

Before joining IIBM, Vicente was an OSA Deutsch Research Fellow working at the Lab of Dr. Brett E. Bouma at the Wellman Center, Massachusetts General Hospital. Vicente completed his PhD in Biophysics at Harvard University and in Medical Engineering and Medical Physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, working at the Lab of Dr. Adam E. Cohen on developing microscopy and optogenetic protocols for high-speed all-optical neurophysiology.

Previously, Vicente was an MIT-Madrid M+Visión Fellow, where he worked to reduce colorectal cancer mortality by increasing the sensitivity of colonoscopy to premalignant lesions, and to improve molecular imaging for oncology by multiplexing Positron Emission Tomography (PET). He completed his Electrical Engineering and MS degrees at Catholic University of Chile where he developed a theoretical framework to enable cheaper Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scanners.

For more information about Dr. Parot's research visit his Lab website here

Tomás Ossandón

The goal of his research line is to study how attention modulates our behavior, with a particular interest in the neural mechanisms underlying its interaction with perceptual systems, large-scale brain networks and decision making. His research group uses EEG, intracortical EEG, fMRI, eye-tracker and behavioral models.

For more information about Dr. Ossandón research background visit his personal website here

Francisco Sahli

Francisco Sahli obtained his Mechanical Engineer degree and Master of Engineering Sciences from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile on 2011.

In 2018 he completed his PhD in Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University with the support of a Fulbright-CONICYT fellowship. Since 2019 he is an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical and Metallurgical Engineering and the Institute for Biological and Medical Engineering at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.

For more information about Dr. Sahli research background visit his personal website here

Tomás Egaña

Molecular Biotechnology Engineer and PhD in Pharmacology (both from the Universidad de Chile). He also holds a degree in Doctor of Human Biology (Universität zu Lübeck, Germany) and a qualification in Experimental Plastic Surgery (Technische Universität München, Germany).

His research has focused mainly on the area of Regenerative Medicine, highlighting his work in the development of new therapeutic strategies for the regeneration of skin wounds. In this context, with his research group, he combines approaches in Biomaterials, Cellular and Molecular Therapy with the development of new experimental models. One of its main contributions has been "Photosynthetic Therapy", which seeks to oxygenate damaged tissues through the generation of hybrid plant-animal systems.