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Students in the IRB laboratory during the last edition of the BIYSC (Photo: La Pedrera).
 09.07.2018

Starts the third edition BIYSC

Today and until July 20 will take place the third edition of the Barcelona International Youth Science Challenge (BIYSC), an international program of excellence for young people passionate about science organized by Fundació Catalunya–La Pedrera and with the support of Fundació Víctor Grífols i Lucas. Once more, Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC) and the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona) –both headquartered at the Barcelona Scientific Park–  participate in the event. The objective of the initiative is to stimulate the talent of pre-university youth from around the world and connect them with leading researchers from international research centers based in Barcelona to promote their enthusiasm for science.

 

BIYSC wellcomes a 100 students aged between 16 and 18  from 23 different countries from the five continents and offers the chance to work in English, side by side with researchers of the 10 most prestigious centers of Catalonia, and become face to face with the different challenges that science and technology brings everyday; attend scientific conferences, debates and seminars given by the leading scientists of the groups; and share two weeks with young people around the world for years who have been enthusiastic about science, among other activities.

IBEC will receive those students who are taking part in the “Instructive Biomaterials for Regenerative Medicine” project, coordinated by Biomaterials for Regenerative Therapies members Soledad Pérez and Jesús Ordoño. The project will help the students understand the basis of regenerative medicine and to find out about developing of target-specific biomaterial scaffolding systems. Moreover, the group SPECS (Synthetic, Perceptive, Emotive and Cognitive Systems), also from the IBEC, will give the workshop “Neuro-robotics as a tool to understand the brain” in this course we will use mobile 3D printed robots to learn how to build complex behaviors that are not just reactive responses to a stimulus but that include learning and memory as well.

For his part, l’IRB is participating through the workshop “Drosophila melanogaster: a model to study human disease” given by PhD and postdoctoral students from the Development and Growth Control Laboratory where researchers work with the fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) as a means to model and study human disease. In this workshop they will be able how to use this model to study the main mechanisms underlying neurodegenerative diseases.