Cristina Canal is Associate Professor in the Materials Science and Engineering Dpt. at UPC, where she heads the PlasmaMedLab -Biomedical Applications of Cold Plasmas, which is part of the Biomaterials, Biomechanics and Tissue Engineering (BBT) group. She is Research Deputy Director at the Center for Research in Biomedical Engineering (CREB|UPC). She has published around 90 papers in diverse fields related to Plasma Medicine, surface modification of textiles and biomaterials with cold plasmas, bone tissue regeneration and drug delivery. In these fields she has advised 8 PhD Thesis & 7 postdoctoral researchers, and has . Among others, she has received the 2018 Early Career Award in Plasma Medicine and the L’Oreal-Unesco for Young women in science (2011) awards. She has been PI in different competitive projects, among them an ERC Starting Grant. 

Research interests

Dr. Cristina Canal’s research aims at investigating cold atmospheric pressure plasmas and their interactions with liquids and biomaterials for therapeutic applications. Together with an interdisciplinary team, she aims at understanding the interactions and mechanisms beyond the interactions of reactive species from the gas phase with biomaterials in the liquid phase, and their biological outcomes, especially with regard to cancer therapies. The challenges they face are related to describing the role of reactive oxygen and nitrogen species generated by plasmas with biopolymers in solution, and their effects on biological response as well as on the functionality of the biomaterials.

Keywords

cold plasma; biomaterials; drug delivery; tissue regeneration; bone cancer ;