Jerome Noailly
Jérôme Noailly holds a bachelor’s degree in physical chemistry, an Engineer’s and a master’s degree in Material Science, and a master’s degree in Acoustics. In 2002, he started a PhD on spine computational biomechanics at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona (UPC), Spain, focussing on theoretical approximations in finite element modelling. In 2006, he was awarded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship (MECNOR-518768) and worked in computational mechanobiology for cartilage tissue engineering at the AO Foundation (Davos, Switzerland) and at the Eindhoven University of Technology (The Netherlands), including the experimental characterisation and computational analyses of fibrin gels. In 2009, he went back to Barcelona with a Marie Skłodowska-Curie reintegration grant (SEVBIOM-249210) and retook spine modelling activities at the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC), Barcelona, Spain. The same year, he won the Best PhD Thesis award in Engineering from the UPC. In 2010, he co-led a major European research proposal, which was funded (My Spine - FP7-269909). In 2012, in his quality as principal investigator (PI) the My Spine project, he became the head of the Biomechanics and Mechanobiology group at IBEC, being responsible for up to five contracted full-time researchers, and he seized the opportunity to expand the research of the group to the field of computational systems biology, in the framework of another European project, The Grail (FP7-278557).
In 2015, Jérôme relocated at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF), in his quality as PI of the Multiscale and Computational Biomechanics and Mechanobiology (MBIOMM) group (2014-SGR-1616). As a member of the Department of Information and Communication Technologies (DTIC) and SIMBIOSys group at UPF, he took the oportunity to include medical image analysis and machine learning components to his research. At the same time, he was consolidating the integration of computational systems biology approaches for multiscale explorations of tissues and organs. In 2016, he was awarded a Ramon y Cajal fellowship (RYC-2015-18888) from the Spanish government, and in 2019, he became Tenure-Track Associate Professor at DTIC, where he was eventually promoted to Full Professor, in 2023. He is currently co-director of the SIMBIOSys group and he is leading the Biomechanics and Mechanobiology Area of the Barcelona Centre for New Medical Technologies. He is the Coordinator of the European project Disc4All (H2020-IT-ETN-955735), and receipient of the European Research Council Consolidator Grant O-Health (101044828).
He has been supervising 15 PhD theses, and he has 150+ contributions to congresses, two book chapters and 50+ articles in international journals, out which nearly 70% are in Q1 journals. At UPF, he is teaching biomechanics, biomaterials, and musculoskeletal and biological system modelling, subjects that he is also coordinating. From 2018 to 2022, he has coordinated the UPF Bachelor’s in Biomedical Engineering, and from 2022 to 2024 he was the Coordinator of Intermational Mobility, for the UPF School of Engineering. Internationally, he has served as a member Council of the European Society of Biomechanics (ESB), from 2016 to 2024, having been successively the Treasurer, and the Vice-President of the ESB, between 2020 and 2022, and between 2022 and 2024, respectively. He is a past president of the National Spanish Chapter of the ESB, and Chair of the Student Committee of the Virtual Physiological Human Institute (VPHi).