Alicia El Haj

Alicia El Haj is a Professor and the Interdisciplinary Chair of Cell Engineering at the School of Chemical Engineering and the Healthcare Technologies Institute at the Institute of Translational Medicine, University of Birmingham. She is the President of the UK Bioengineering Society and Director of MICA Biosystems. She is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. She was president of the European Council of the International Society for Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine (2010 to 2014).

Early life and education El Haj earned a Masters at University of Manchester and a PhD at the University of Aberdeen.

Research and career El Haj is a leading researcher in regenerative medicine. In 1989 El Haj joined the University of Birmingham as a lecturer. In 1997 she was appointed to Keele University, to lead a joint programme in cell engineering with the University of Manchester. The Institute treated osteoarthritis sufferers by taking cartilage cells from the healthy parts of patient's knees and culturing them in vitro to grow new knee tissue. At Keele University, she has been the Theme Lead for Bioengineering and Regenerative Medicine. That year she won the Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award.

EL Haj's team are designing therapeutics where magnetic nanoparticles are used to signal systems on a cell, injecting them into the body and using an external magnet to guide them to where they are needed. She is investigating the best conditions for growing the matrix of bone. In 2015 she won the Medical Research Council Suffrage Science Award. In 2016 she became co-director of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council Centre for Innovative Manufacturing Centre in Regenerative Medicine. She is Chair Elect of the European Council's Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine International Society. El Haj was made a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2017.

El Haj is the Chair of the Bioengineering Society.

Selected publications