Dr Joaquim M. S. Cabral is Professor of Biological Engineering, in the Department of Bioengineering at Instituto Superior Tecnico (IST), Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal. He was the founder and current Head of Department of Bioengineering, and the Director of the Institute for Biotechnology and Bioengineering, a Research Laboratory Associated to the Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education in Portugal. His research aims at contributing to biochemical engineering science through novel developments in Bioprocess Engineering and Stem Cell Bioengineering. Dr. Claudia Lobato da Silva, born in Lisboa, Portugal, 1978, received a Diploma in Chemical Engineering (Biotechnology), Instituto Superior Tecnico (IST), Technical University of Lisboa (Universidade Tecnica de Lisboa, UTL), Portugal, in 2001 and got a Ph.D. in Biotechnology in 2006 at IST-UTL in collaboration with the University of Nevada, Reno, USA.Dr. Claudia Lobato da Silva is Assistant Professor at the Department of Bioengineering, IST-UTL, Lisboa, Portugal, and is co-author of 32 scientific articles published in international peer-reviewed journals and 4 book chapters. Her research interests include expansion of human stem cells, namely hematopoietic and mesenchymal stem cells, cellular therapies with human adult stem cells, isolation and purification of stem cells, and bioreactors for stem cell culture. At IST-UTL, Dr. Claudia Lobato da Silva is the faculty responsible for the courses Cell and Tissue Engineering (since 2008/2009) and Stem Cell Bioengineering (since 2010/2011), whose attendees include MSc students in Biological Engineering and Biomedical Engineering. Recently, Dr. Claudia Lobato da Silva was appointed as Associate Editor of BMC Biotechnology. Dr. Lucas Chase has extensive research experience in both adult and pluripotent stem cell biology. After obtaining a Ph.D. from the Molecular, Cellular, Developmental Biology and Genetics program at the University of Minnesota, Dr. Chase joined the Stem Cells unit at Invitrogen Corporation (now Life Technologies) in 2007, working on the development of cGMP culture media, advanced cellular models and drug discovery assays. In 2010, Dr. Chase joined Cellular Dynamics International, the world's largest producer of fully functional human cells derived from induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, to support development of novel cell-based models for drug discovery and basic life science applications. In addition to co-authoring numerous articles and book chapters, Dr. Chase has also co-edited two books, Mesenchymal stem Cell Assays and Applications and Mesenchymal Stem Cell Therapy. Dr Maria Margarida Diogo received her PhD degree in Biotechnology from Instituto Superior Tecnico (IST) from January 2000 to April 2004. Her thesis was dedicated to the development of Bioprocesses for Production and Purification of Plasmid DNA for Gene Therapy and DNA vaccines. As a result of this work, a United States Patent was published in 2007. From April 2004 to March 2008 she received a post-doctoral fellowship to work in the field of Stem Cell Bioengineering and she is presently a Research Scientist at the Stem Cell Bioengineering Laboratory at Instituto Superior Tecnico (IST).
