BEYOND THE LAB COAT: Mário Barbosa
Mário Barbosa is Full Professor at Instituto de Ciências Biomédicas Abel Salazar (ICBAS) of University of Porto. He was born in Azurara a beautiful village near the sea, in Vila Do Conde, north of Portugal. Mário was born at 4th of October of 1950, at the golden decade where the first steps of DNA discovery were disclosed.
In 1972 he got his Metallurgic Eng degree from University of Porto in Portugal and 6 years later, in 1978, he finished his Ph.D at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom. Back to Portugal, Mário was not feeling challenged by the issues in the metallurgic field.
Nevertheless, a novel branch in the area puzzled him. He was confronted with the corrosion problems in orthopedic field. This was the starting point of the long journey in the Biomaterials area. In this subject, Mário has supervised the first Ph.D thesis in Portugal on the degradation of metallic implants.
He has also led the first national project in the field with Augusto Costa (HAS) and Maria de Sousa (ICBAS). In 1988, the first National Congress in Biomedical Engineering took place at Porto where the need of creating an Institute was debated and the INEB was born under the motivation of “The Fantastic Four”: Professor Nuno Grande, Mário himself, Cassiano Abreu Lima and Joaquim Marques de Sá.
During his path Mário was President of the Portuguese National research council (JNICT), President of Engineering Sciences Scientific council of FCT, member of director’s board of Biomaterials European Society and President of European Society of Bioceramics, among others. Nowadays, his name represents one of the best known researchers in the Biomaterials field.
MAIN CHALLENGE(S):
Render the I3S as a challenging reality.
Develop immuno-modulatory biomaterials in order benefit from the inflammation process to promote bone regeneration.
INEB IN ONE WORD
Transgress.
INEB was created and is still based on transgressions. Transgressions that started, from the beginning (1989), to break the “Little boxes on the hillside, Little boxes are all the same”. Engineering became biological and Biology started to be mechanical. The transdisciplinarity that strongly identify the research at INEB is made of transgressions that, across different research areas, keep us close.
BEYOND THE LAB COAT...
The most exciting activities out of INEB are walking, do exercise every morning, fish in the sea, write and cook.
THE MOVIE
Solaris (1972).
THE BOOK
A Casa de Papel by Carlos María Domínguez.
THE TRIP
The dream destination would be Tibet.
IF I WASN'T A SCIENTIST, I WOULD BE...
… would love to be a poetry writer.