Prof. Julie MacPherson (Department of Chemistry, University of Warwick) has lectured for three days on "Electrical and electrochemical scanning probe techniques for imaging biological systems in fluid environment" at the University of Barcelona.

Last 6th May Nano2Life has organised an industry workshop. This workshop, being one of the last events of Nano2Life, has been an international event offering a forum for the exchange of innovative business solutions with the participation of Nano2Life top research institutions. 28 participants from 17 companies from 5 different European countries have attended to this event.

Josep Samitier, head of the IBEC nanobioengineering group, was appointed Acting Rector of the University of Barcelona (UB) on 21 April.

The aim of Recerca en Directe is to show to scholar institutions, high schools and people in general research activities carried out at the research centres in Barcelona, in order to approach to the public how research is done directly from researchers themselves. The exhibition will be open from April 10th to 11th at the Espacio Movistar tent of the Diagonal Campus, c/ Pascual i Vila s/n – Barcelona.

In any biological process, multiple interactions occurring at the molecular level make it impossible to observe live cells in real time, because light microscopes cannot focus light at scales of less than 350 nanometres.  New breakthroughs in nanophotonics, however, will shortly enable us to visualise molecular processes at an optical resolution of ten nanometres, according to researcher María García-Parajo, head of the Bionanophotonics Laboratory at IBEC.

Mater is a Fomento de las Artes y del Diseño (FAD) project for the Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Trade, born from the increasing importance of materials in the development of our society. It starts with the exhibition “Mater in progress. New materials, new industry”, which revolves around innovation and technological development through materials, and is on show at the Sala de Exposiciones FAD (plaça dels Àngels 5-6), from February 8 until April 28, 2008.

On November 7, 2007, the public presentation of the IBEC was held within the framework of the IBEC Bioengineering and Nanomedicine Symposium 2007. The event took place at the Antoni Caparrós Auditorium in the Parc Científic de Barcelona, with an excellent attendance of about 180 professionals.

IBEC’s Bionanophotonics research line, led by Prof. María García-Parajo, together with researchers from Mesa+ Institute for Technology of the University of Twente (The Netherlands), the Nijmegen Center for Molecular Life Sciences (The Netherlands) and the Institute of Photonic Sciences (Barcelona) have been given the cover page of the July 16 ChemPhysChem issue (Volume 8 Issue 10).

The prestigious reference textbook Molecular Cell Biology (Lodish et al.) has selected for its 6th edition (2008) a figure from the researcher at the nanobioengineering laboratory at the IBEC, Dr. Xavier Fernández-Busquets. Thanks to this important recognition of scientific excellence, the IBEC is the only Spanish institution appearing in the acknowledgements of the textbook, out of a total of 150 universitites and research centres.

Ruth Diez-Ahedo, PhD student at IBEC, has received the best poster award for her poster entitled "Tailored ICAM-1 patterned surfaces to study the nano-scale organisation of the adhesion receptor LFA-1", granted by the European Science Foundation (ESF) and European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) Symposium on Biological Surfaces and interfaces that took place in Sant Feliu de Guixols, Spain, from July 1-6, 2007.