I’m Catarina Coelho, a biomedical engineer working at FLUIDINOVA as an R&D project manager. I have a PhD degree in Biomedical Engineering from the Faculty of Engineering at Porto University and my PhD was done in collaboration with industry, in which I developed an antibacterial bone substitute product for FLUIDINOVA. During the last 11 years, my research has been focused on the use of calcium phosphates like hydroxyapatite, mainly for bone regeneration applications. I consider myself a very creative person so I enjoy doing things that stimulate my creativity. For example, in my free time, I love to cook and to photograph. Moreover, I also like to be outdoors and play padel with my friends. In GIOTTO, I was involved in the up-scale of the bioactive materials used in the project: the strontium nano-hydroxyapatite (Sr-nano-HA) and the mesoporous bioactive glasses (MBGs).

I was mostly involved in the production of Sr-nano-HA, especially in the industrial scale-up of this material. This task was a great success for us at FLUIDINOVA because we were able to fully industrialize the production of our material and start its commercialization. Moreover, I also worked in the TRL5 development of the MBGs synthesized by POLITO. This collaborative work with POLITO was also very fruitful and together we were able to demonstrate the production of the MBGs at a larger scale.

Yes, indeed. GIOTTO was the first project I was involved after my PhD grant ended. Before that, I worked in some projects but all those projects were at a national level, here in Portugal. GIOTTO was the first European project I participated and it was great to collaborate with researchers from different countries across Europe. I really enjoyed the dynamics of working in this kind of project and I learned a lot with these amazing professionals.