Josep Maria Font Llagunes

Josep Maria is Associate Professor of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) in Barcelona. He is also the Director of the Biomechanical Engineering Lab (BIOMEC) at CREB and Co-founder of the spin-off ABLE Human Motion. Currently, he is Associate Director of Research and Technology Transfer at the Barcelona School of Industrial Engineering (ETSEIB), having served as Associate Director of Postgraduate Studies during the period 2013-2017.

Josep Maria obtained the Master's Degrees in Industrial Engineering (minor in Mechanical Engineering) and Biomedical Engineering from UPC, and received his PhD Degree in Mechanical Engineering from University of Girona. Then, he did his postdoc at the Centre for Intelligent Machines of McGill University (Canada) thanks to a mobility scholarship from UPC.

He founded the BIOMEC research lab in 2009 and, since then, has led several competitive projects and industrial contracts in the areas of rehabilitation robotics, biomechanics of human movement, and multibody system dynamics. So far, he has published 32 articles in high-impact journals, more than 100 conference papers, 3 book chapters, and has supervised 3 doctoral theses. He chaired the ECCOMAS Thematic Conference on Multibody Dynamics that took place in Barcelona in 2015, and has actively participated in the program and organizing committees of various scientific conferences in the above-mentioned research areas. Since 2015, he serves as Vice-President of the Spanish Chapter of the European Society of Biomechanics (ESB). He is also member of the Technical Committee for Multibody Dynamics of IFToMM (International Federation for the Promotion of Mechanism and Machine Science), and between 2014 and 2016 participated in the International Steering Committee of IMSD (International Association for Multibody System Dynamics). Josep Maria has been awarded with the Agustín de Betancourt y Molina Medal by the Royal Academy of Engineering (2017), the OpenSim/NCSRR Outstanding Researcher Award(2017), and the Leonardo Grant by the BBVA Foundation (2018).