About

Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University

Andres Sanz-Garcia serves as Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Department at the University of Salamanca (USAL) since 2018. He is a senior member of the research group Laser Applications & Photonics (ALF4) led by Prof. Luis Plaja and the Molecular Medicine group led by Prof. MD. Rogelio Gonzalez Sarmiento, both belonging to USAL. Andres is a visiting researcher at the Wyss Institute at Harvard University – Medical School (HMS) and the University of Helsinki (UH). Andres has two degrees in Engineering, one master in Industrial Engineering, and started computer science studies. He has worked for almost ten years for private companies in different fields related to project management, rapid prototyping, and advanced manufacturing methods. His broad experience as a project manager has allowed him to deal with various projects in several fields simultaneously. In 2007, his research career started as an Assistant Professor at the Mechanical Department of the UR. Since then, he has been involved in a European project, another Spanish National project, and more than a dozen of competitive research projects.

During his doctoral studies (2010-2013) in the Engineering Data Mining and Numerical Simulations (EDMANS) research group, he worked on massive data analysis and machine learning techniques applied to galvanized steel production lines. The Ph.D. project was challenging as it dealt with a complex process of continuous production lines for manufacturing flat steel products. During his Ph.D., he was always actively participating in the research activities of the EDMANS, writing articles and new projects for funding applications. Andres was awarded four fellowships for short research visits in Bologna, Bacau, and Aalto’s universities. Both fellowships were under the supervision of Prof. Jaakko Höllmen and were related to the application of Data Mining to meteorological and biological data. In 2013, he joined the Faculty of Pharmacy at the UH (Finland) as a postdoctoral researcher under the supervision of Dr. Carmen Escobedo-Lucea for working in the international FINSKIN project funded by the Academy of Finland. In close collaboration with other members of Dr. Carmen Escobedo-Lucea’s laboratory, he developed new bioprinting strategies for tissue engineering, especially for the fabrication of artificial tissue-engineered skin. During this period, he obtained a 2-years fellowship at Okano’s laboratory in the Institute of Advanced Biomedical Engineering and Science (Tokyo), working on the coupling of bioprinting and cell sheet technologies. He also spent 18 months in the Chen Lab at the Wyss Institute (Boston), learning the organ-on-a-chip technology and combining this technology with other biofabrication methods.

His current research is highly interdisciplinary, with two main research lines. One line has focused on the development and application of novel tools for 3D bioprinting. These works involve designing new bioprinters by incorporating parallel mechanisms and coupling different manufacturing technologies to obtain vascularized artificial tissues. The other research has been oriented towards the development of novel in vitro cell culture systems. He is researching laser-based microfabrication, organ-on-chip design, and label-free characterization technologies, among others. Both are challenging fields that require a multidisciplinary team and excellent interdisciplinary research background.