Professor Aldo R. Boccaccini

Summary

Aldo Boccaccini is Professor of Biomaterials and Head of the Institute of Biomaterials at the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany. He is currently Chair of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Erlangen. 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. 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 22 PhD students and several post-doctoral researchers, visiting students and academic visitors. He is also associated with the Composites Centre and the UK Centre for Advanced Structural Ceramics 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 850 scientific papers and 22 book chapters and his work has been cited more than 28,500 times (Web of Science).

Prof. Boccaccini has pioneered the use of electrophoretic deposition for production of nanostructured materials and composites. In the last few years he has developed extensive research activities in the area of scaffold materials for tissue engineering applications with focus on highly porous bioactive and degradable composite scaffolds with nanostructured surface topography. The addition of a bioactive component, for example tailored compositions of bioactive glasses, represents a significant improvement towards applications due to the possibility of tuning the degradation rate, mechanical properties and biological response of the scaffold.

In 2014 he was named a Thomson Reuters Highly Cited Researcher and he is included in the report: "2014 The World's Most Influential Scientific Minds". 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), the Verulam Medal and Prize 2003 and the Ivor Jenkins Medal 2010 of the Institute of Materials Minerals and Mining (IOM3) and the 2011 McMahon Lecture Award of Alfred University, NY (USA). He has been elected Fellow of the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining of the UK (2004) and of the American Ceramic Society (2011). 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. He is a member of the Advisory Board of the German Materials Society (DGM). Prof. Boccaccini was a member of the EU chapter of the Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine International Society (TERMIS) until 2010. From 2010 he has been the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Materials Letters. Boccaccini serves in the editorial board of several recognized international journals including Journal of Materials Science, J. Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine, J. Biomaterials Applications, Advanced Engineering Materials, Advances in Applied Ceramics, Int. Journal of Applied Glass Science, Scientific Reports, Materials Today Chemistry and J. Mater. Processing Technology. Prof. Boccaccini is the founder and first editor-in-chief of the open access journal Biomedical Glasses. He is also the founder of the successful International Conferences Series on Electrophoretic Deposition and he was the Chairman of the five conferences of the series held so far in Canada (2002), Italy (2005), Japan (2008), Mexico (2011) and Austria (2014) and he will serve as chairman of the next conference (2017) in Korea. In 2013 Boccaccini chaired the Annual Conference of the German Society of Biomaterials (DGBM). Boccaccini is also an international advisor to the Ministry of Science and Technology of Argentina (MinCyT) and he was awarded (Nov. 2013) the prestigious “RAICES” prize of MinCyT recognizing international leadership in research collaborations with Argentina. In 2015 Boccaccini received the Materials Science Award of the German Materials Society (DGM 2015 Preis) and he was elected member (Academician) of the World Academy of Ceramics. Also in 2015, Prof. Boccaccini was elected member of the Council of the European Society for Biomaterials (ESB). In 2016 he was elected to the Executive Committee of the Federation of European Materials Societies (FEMS) and received several awards including, the Turner Award of the International Commission on Glass (2016), the 2016 Pfeil Award of the UK Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining (IOM3) and the Friedberg Lecture Award (2016) of the American Ceramic Society. He received in 2017 the Diels-Planck-Lecture 2017, Kiel Nano, Surface and Interface Science (KiNSIS), Kiel, Germany. In 2018, he was elected Fellow of the Society of Glass Technology (UK) and Ordinary Member of the National Academy of Science and Engineering (acatech) of Germany. Prof. Boccaccini was included in the Highly Cited Researchers 2018 list (Clarivate Analytics).

A note regarding the farewell to Prof. Boccaccini, as Ambassador of Imperial College, when he left Imperial in 2009, is posted in this site.

Publications

Journals

More Publications