Heidi Declercq,
Head of the Bioprint Facility and Tissue Engineering Group, Department of Human Structure and Repair
Heidi Declercq, PhD, studied Biomedical Engineering and received her PhD (In vitro models for bone tissue engineering) in Medical Sciences from Ghent University, Belgium, in 2005. As postdoctoral researcher, she was involved in the evolution of top-down (scaffold-based) to bottom-up (developmental inspired) tissue engineering strategies. She worked on several effects of (printed) scaffold parameters to enhance cellular differentiation. She studied expansion and differentiation of human adult and embryonic stem cells. But later on, she focused to modular tissue engineering by at random assembling of stem cell-seeded microcarriers and spheroids. In 2017 she became head of the Tissue Engineering group with embedded the Bioprint Facility. Her group, aims to biofabricate complex and vascularized tissues via hybrid technologies. Hybrid bioprinting will combine aspects of top-down and bottom-up engineering and will have synergistic effects on fabricated tissues (maturation, mechanical strength,…). Tissue-specific or vascular spheroids are fabricated in high throughput and bioprinted in combination with smart biomaterials.
H. Declercq is involved as lecturer (Cell & Tissue Culture, Biomaterials, Tissue Engineering) for bachelor and master students Biomedical Sciences and Biomedical Engineering. She is the founder of GATE, Gent Alliance for Tissue Engineering, aiming to unite all research groups at UGent involved in the field of tissue engineering and with different expertises (modelling, smart biomaterials, microfluidics, stem cells, …), leading to bridge the gap in healthcare.
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