Cooperation contributes to the development of professionals
As part of the objectives of improving technical and organizational skills, as well as training professionals in genetics and transformation of material for added value, the National Institute of Industrial Technology (Instituto Nacional de Tecnología Industrial - INTI) of Argentina, together with the Sociolario Cooperative in Italy and the Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana (UPB) of Colombia, obtained a scholarship for a PhD student from the UPB at the University of Trento, Italy.
Mrs Natalia Jaramillo Quiceno, Industrial Engineer, holder of a Master's degree in Engineering and currently a PhD student at the UPB, will do an internship at the University of Trento, from September 2019 to February 2020. The internship will consist of research activities at the BIOtech Research Center, under the supervision of Dr. Antonella Motta. "I will also have the possibility to attend classes on Bio-inspired Technologies and Biodesign Applied to the Area of Tissue Engineering", said Natalia.
The internship will be carried out within the framework of the specialization fellowship programme of the International Italo-Latin American Organization - IILA. "During the internship, I will carry out structural studies on silk, fibroin and sericin proteins, with the aim of strengthening our group's knowledge and skills on the processing of these proteins with a view to obtaining biomaterials with differentiated structure and properties. Some of the techniques we will apply in these studies include Solid State Nuclear Magnetic Resonance and Gel Permeation Chromatography", explained Quiceno.
"This is a great opportunity for me to build and maintain enriching connections with researchers who, like us, are interested in developing biomaterials from silk proteins. I also hope that my experience will strengthen the capacities of the New Materials Research Group at the UPB to develop research that will allow the use of fibrous waste from the production of silk in our country", enthusiastically indicated the PhD student in Engineering, who is part of the New Materials Research Group at the UPB, led by Engineer Adriana Restrepo Osorio, technical expert of the UPB for the Silk Project.
