Dr Shahab Akhavan and Dr Hossein Heidari are UCL academics with an ambition to transform STEM learning across the board. They share a focal point of materials science and engineering innovations in research and education in their track records. They have constantly endeavoured to deliver state-of-the-art experiences to students in the classroom as well as in the research lab. Serving as instructors and module leaders for multiple modules at UCL, QMUL, Cambridge and UC Berkeley, they bring over two decades of teaching experience in engineering education.
Dr Hossein Heidari (HH) is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow and Lecturer (research) at the IMD specialises in soft biomaterials and light-based additive manufacturing technologies. His doctoral work at the University of California at Berkeley in collaboration with the Lawrence Livermore National Lab led to biofabrication breakthroughs overcoming some of the manufacturing challenges of soft tissue micro-environments and the development of the first ever volumetric additive manufacturing (VAM) process. In 2018, he secured a $170K research collaboration grant with BASF, the world’s largest chemical producer and was later awarded the Anselmo Macchi Fellowship by the School of Engineering. In 2019 he won the SPIE Photonics Start-up Challenge, and succeeded in demonstrating the impact of this technology through their publication in Science. He joined the startup Volumetric Bio in 2020 where his work focused on the development of high-throughput vascular tissue platforms for drug screening and pharma with United Therapeutics, Janssen and Merck. Their startup was successfully acquired by 3D Systems (world's largest 3D printing company) for $400 Million in 2021, and he joined the Queen Mary University of London's SEMS faculty as a Lecturer in Biomedical Engineering. He holds an affiliated faculty position at the Terasaki Institute for Biomedical Innovations. He recently received the UKRI's flagship Future Leaders Fellowship, a £1.7 million research grant to fund SPARK 3D - an organ-manufacturing project that will integrate bioprinting, biomodulation and imaging in a volumetric bioproduction system to produce 3D tissues.
Dr. Shahab Akhavan (SA) is a Lecturer (teaching) at the Institute for Materials Discovery (IMD) at University College London. He received his PhD from the University of Cambridge, Engineering Department. His research interests include: (i) Developing innovative techniques for the fabrication of wearable electronics. SA pioneered inkjet lithography of graphene and related materials for photodetection applications and rolling layered materials around fibres for sustainable and wearable applications. SA has published more than 20 journal articles, including in ACS Nano, Nano Letters, and Small. He has also delivered keynote and invited talks at major international conferences and received the SPIE Photonics Awards and IEEE Electron Device Society Award (citation >410, h-index 10). His recent US-granted patent (US11869728), supported by the University of Cambridge Enterprise as part of his PhD thesis, demonstrates his strong diligence in exploring commercialization possibilities.
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