Dr. Aldo Roberto Boccaccini (2025)

Dr Aldo Roberto Boccaccini is a leading international figure in the field of biomaterials and bioengineering. Born on 2 September 1962 in San Rafael (Argentina), he is a nuclear engineer by training and a materials scientist at heart. He is currently professor of Biomaterials and head of the Institute of Biomaterials at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (Germany), a role he combines with that of visiting professor at Imperial College London (United Kingdom). 

His academic journey began in Argentina, where he studied Electromagnetic Engineering for two years at the San Rafael National Technological University, going on to earn a degree in Nuclear Engineering at the Balseiro Institute (Bariloche, Argentina) in 1987. He continued his education in Germany, where he completed a doctorate in Engineering Sciences at RWTH Aachen in 1994. He was later conferred Habilitation at Technische Universität Ilmenau (Germany) in 2001.

His initial years as a postdoctoral fellow led him to the Department of Materials at Imperial College London (United Kingdom), where he was appointed professor in 2008. In 2009, Dr Boccaccini returned to Germany as head of the Institute of Biomaterials at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg, where he also chaired the Department of Materials Science and Engineering from 2017 to 2019. In 2022, his birthplace, San Rafael, named him an “Distinguished Person”.

Dr Boccaccini’s outstanding research focuses on the development of bioactive glasses and ceramics, functional polymers and biofabrication systems with biomedical applications. He was a pioneer in the use of the electrophoretic deposition technique to generate nano-structured scaffolds for tissue engineering. His integrated approach combines materials, biology and engineering, with a clear focus on innovation and clinical translation.

During his career, Dr Boccaccini served as editor-in-chief of the journal Materials Letters for 14 years (2010-2023) and founded the open access journal Biomedical Glasses. He has published over 900 research papers and co-edited seven books and more than 20 books chapters. Dr Boccaccini is a highly cited researcher: according to Google Scholar (January 2024), he has been cited more than 91,000 times and has an h-index of 133. He has appeared repeatedly in Clarivate Analytics’ list of the most cited scholars and Stanford University's list of the World’s Top 2% Scientists.

He is a member of several prominent international societies, including the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining (United Kingdom), the American Ceramic Society, the European Ceramic Society and the Society of Glass Technology. Over the course of his career, Boccaccini has received multiple honours, such as the Materials Prize from the German Materials Society (2015) and an Honorary Doctorate from Åbo Akademi University (Turku, Finland). He is also an elected member of the World Academy of Ceramics, the National Academy of Engineering and Applied Sciences of Germany (acatech) and the European Academy of Sciences (EurAsc). 

Boccaccini currently serves as president of the Federation of European Materials Societies (FEMS) and member of the Board of the Bioceramics Network of the European Ceramic Society (ECerS). In 2023, he was elected fellow of Biomaterials Science and Engineering (FBSE) by the International Union of Societies for Biomaterials Science.