During my Ph.D. at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC, 2011-2015), I developed and worked with optimization and muscle-synergy techniques to study muscle redundancy during walking. I did one clinical study in collaboration with a group of surgeons and another one as a result of my Ph.D. stay at the University of Florida under the supervision of Dr. B.J. Fregly, who became my Ph.D. co-supervisor. From these studies, three publications were published in peer-review journals (as first author).
During my postdoc at KU Leuven (2015-2016), I worked in an IWT-SBO Flanders project. The project, entitled MIRAD (an integrated Methodology to bring Intelligent Robotic Assistive Devices to the user), was aimed to generate generic scientific and technological knowledge around the development of an exoskeleton to assist movements of subjects with muscle deficiency. I was responsible for the WP on simulation. I set the bases and developed an optimal control framework to predict subject-exoskeleton contact and foot-ground reaction forces, which was published in IEEE Trans. Neural Syst. Rehabilitation Eng.
Between 2016 and 2018, in collaboration with the Ph.D. candidate A. Falisse in KU Leuven (now postdoc at Stanford University), we integrated automatic differentiation tools in OpenSim. We both attended several workshops. A. Falisse was also research visitor in UPC in 2016, and we had the opportunity to be OpenSim Visitor Scholars in Stanford University in 2017. This is a competitive fellowship within the biomechanics community to do a research stay in Stanford on an OpenSim project. We published two peer-reviewed papers showing that biomechanical simulations of full-body muscle-driven models based on optimal control problems were ~20× faster than other conventional methods. Since 2020, I am OpenSim Fellow.
In 2016, I obtained a tenure-track position as Assistant Professor at UPC, and in 2021 I became an Associate Professor, within the competitive Serra Húnter Program. I created the Simulation and Movement Analysis Lab (SIMMA Lab) and worked on my own biomechanics research lines. The optimal control framework previously mentioned was also disseminated. I received two Ph.D. candidates (four-month Ph.D. stays) from the group of Dario Cazzola (University of Bath, UK) to apply these methods in simulations of sprinting and simulations of movements in partial gravity. From these projects, one journal paper is published and two are currently under-review. I continued the collaboration with Dr. Friedl De Groote and we were invited to give a workshop within the congress of the International Society of Biomechanics in 2021.
I also collaborated with Prof. Richie Gill from University of Bath in a project to optimize osteotomy plates in silico. I set the basis of the boundary conditions of the FEM analyses, providing muscle force values and the boundary conditions. I also did a short research stay at the University of Bath. We have two peer-reviewed papers in common, one of them in Communications Medicine. I also collaborated with Elena Gutiérrez from KTH University, with whom I co-directed a bachelor thesis from UPC.
Since 2016, I strengthen the collaborations with a group of knee surgeons in Barcelona, led by J.C. Monllau. We did several congress presentations about a mobile application to analyse knee instability, and published two peer-reviewed papers. Within this collaboration, I also developed a mesh-based contact model to predict joint contact forces within simulations based on the resolution of optimal control problems.
I have supervised over 30 students, completing either a bachelor or master’s thesis, between UPC and KU Leuven. Two of them (2018 and 2019) were awarded with “the best bachelor’s thesis in engineering from Barcelona”. Currently, I am supervising four Ph.D. candidates: simulating orthopaedic surgeries with FEM analyses; predicting joint moments and contact forces from only kinematics information; developing predictive musculoskeletal simulations including contact pressure models; developing a telerehabilitation system including computational biomechanical analyses. I have also been the PI of 9 research projects, some together with international collaborators. Recently, in 2022, I also did a research stay in Northwestern University (Illinois, USA) at the Matthew Tresch’s Lab, to study the effect of neuromuscular control in joint contact loading.