Prof. Aldo R. Boccaccini from Institute of Biomaterials of the Friedrich Alexander University Erlangen-Nüremberg and Prof. Ivo Dlouhy from IPM who met recently at the KMM VIN General Assembly in Brussels, reviewed their 25 years of research collaborations.
Collaboration within and outside the projects has gradually led to 38 joint highly cited publications and a number of shared doctoral students, now successful scientists. They met for the first time when they were post-doctoral researcher (Boccaccini) and academic visitor (Dlouhy) at the School of Metallurgy and Materials, University of Birmingham, UK, in 1994. They have collaborated in numerous research areas, including glass matrix composites (first joint paper published in 1996), glass fracture characterisation, fibre reinforced ceramics, glass-ceramics, nanocomposites, geopolymers, bioactive glass scaffolds, in projects funded by numerous agencies, including NATO, DAAD and the European Commission, with more than 30 joint research papers published. Prof. Boccaccini said: “Ivo has been a key collaborator of my group during the years, we have complementary expertise and experimental capabilities in our laboratories, so it has been always straightforward to establish collaborative research programs with him and his team, which have led not only to important joint publications but also to numerous exchanges of students and researchers between our Institutes. I am sure this collaboration will continue in the next years”.