Aspects of Tissue Engineering and Mechanobiology

In this course, students are trained to critically evaluate scientific articles by using examples from two domains: perception and neuromechanics. The domain perception is addressed by the question: how can we study how sensory information is processed to guide one's action? For instance: how do you investigate where one perceives a part of one's body to be? Perception will be approached quantitatively, for instance by using the psychophysical method, and will focus on the steps needed to translate experimental results into the understanding of human information processing. This will be done for four modalities: vision (motion and 3D perception), proprioception, haptics, and vestibular, as well as for perceiving another person's intentions. Within the domain neuromechanics, interactions and transformations between neural structures and the musculoskeletal system that give rise to coordinated movements are studied. The students are introduced to the principles of neuromechanics, current knowledge about its main components and the methods applied to study it. Questions addressed are for example, what is the relative contribution of musculoskeletal and neural mechanisms in the regulation of limb stiffness, how do such contributions change with environmental conditions, motor learning, disease or ageing.Each topic is introduced by a lecture discussing some phenomenology and the underlying mechanisms. The students also read one or more papers containing experimental results on that topic, which are critically discussed with classmates and the teachers using the Journal Club format.