Alba Martín Yebra and Pedro de Sousa Martins are two of the eleven researchers of excellence of the Aragonese Agency for Research and Development Foundation (ARAID) that has just resolved its international call for 2024, which allows attracting and stabilising these researchers to develop their scientific career in Aragon and contribute to strengthen R&D&I in our territory.
ARAID's main mission is to attract research talent to promote the Autonomous Community's strategic lines of research and to promote R&D&I as a key factor for development and at the service of the citizens of Aragon.
Alba Martín Yebra will develop her research in the BSICoS group (Biomedical Signal Interpretation and Computational Simulation), PhD in Biomedical Engineering, she studied Telecommunication Engineering and the master's degree in Biomedical Engineering at the University of Zaragoza.
His field of work is focused on the development of physiology-guided biomedical signal processing and interpretation methods.
His line of research is focused on obtaining non-invasive markers based on the ECG (electrocardiogram) to characterise pathologies and identify arrhythmic risk in patients.
He did his PhD at the Politecnico di Milano in co-supervision with the University of Zaragoza, where he gained extensive experience in this line of research. In his subsequent postdoctoral stage at the University of Lund, Sweden, he worked with Prof. Leif Sörnmo, an international expert in the field of atrial fibrillation.
There he gained experience in ECG processing in atrial fibrillation and it allowed him to grow scientifically. From there he obtained a Juan de la Cierva grant with which he was able to return to Zaragoza and start working on different projects with the BSiCos group of the I3A.
Pedro Lopes de Sousa Martins has significant research experience in the field of bio-mechanical engineering, both from an experimental and numerical point of view. He holds a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Porto, where he studied Physics.
His scientific production includes about 90 articles published in international peer-reviewed journals, with more than 2200 citations, with index h = 21 (Scopus) 24 (GS), as of February 2024. He has extensive experience in leading research projects as Principal Investigator. In addition, he has been director of the Biomechanics laboratory at INEGI (Porto, Portugal), specialising in the mechanical characterisation of soft tissues and biomaterials.
With this contract, ARAID will be able to expand its line of research in the Applied Mechanics and Bioengineering (AMB) group of the I3A, focused on the development of artificial intelligence and scientific machine learning techniques in the field of biomechanics, with a view to the development of digital human twins.
He has been involved in the development of thermodynamics-based neural network techniques for the development of patient-specific digital twins.
The combination of Pedro Martins' unique expertise in the characterisation and simulation of biological soft tissues, together with the AMB group's extensive experience in the development of advanced numerical simulation tools, makes this line of research a strategic focus of the group.
