Hans Pvan Oosterwyck PhD

Hans Van Oosterwyck (DOB 02.02.1972) is a professor and the chair of the Biomechanics section (Mechanical Engineering Department) at KU Leuven, where he is heading the Mechanobiology and Tissue Engineering research group. He holds an MSc degree in Materials Engineering (1995) and a PhD degree in Engineering (2000), both obtained at KU Leuven (Leuven, Belgium). He has been a postdoctoral fellow at the AO Research Institute (Davos, Switzerland) in 2004-2005 and a visiting scientist at the University of Zaragoza (Spain) in 2009. He is a member of Prometheus, the Leuven R&D Division for Skeletal Tissue Engineering. In 2012 he was awarded an ERC Starting Grant on the role of cell-matrix interaction in angiogenesis (‘MAtrix: In silico and in vitro Models of Angiogenesis: unraveling the role of the extracellular matrix’). His research focuses on the development of quantitative tools for unraveling the role of the microenvironment for cell fate, in particular the development of multiscale computational models for studying the importance of mechanics and mass transport for angiogenesis and bone regeneration. His research group is strongly interdisciplinary and combines computational modelling with experimental techniques, adopted from various fields, such as cell and tissue mechanics, cell biology, biomaterials and biophysics.