(Vienna, 11-01-2023) Mario Rothbauer from MedUni Vienna's Department of Orthopaedics and Trauma Surgery conducted research in the USA on a prestigious Fulbright scholarship. He joined the Hospital for Special Surgery to work on his project "Hoffa-fibrosis-on-a-chip in osteoarthritis".
The Fulbright Programme is one of the most esteemed scholarship programmes in the world. It promotes academic exchange to and from the USA. Mario Rothbauer received the prestigious grant to join the Otero lab at the Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS), affiliated with Weill Cornell Medicine in New York (USA). There, he combined microfluidic technologies with molecular biology techniques to develop systems for studying fibrosis in osteoarthritis. He conducted his research in the laboratory of Miguel Otero, Associate Scientist in the "Orthopaedic Soft Tissue Research Program" at HSS.
"The support of Fulbright Austria made the travel to the US easy; from the visa application to the last day of the scholarship. It also allowed me to live on the Upper East Side in Manhattan, within a convenient 20-minute walk to the HSS Research Institute and in a great neighbourhood that offers a variety of cultural and entertainment options," says Mario Rothbauer. According to his own statements, he can and will highly recommend the Fulbright Programme to anyone. "It was a wonderful time, and a gratifying scientific and personal experience that I would highly recommend. I'm taking with me new colleagues and brilliant opportunities for long-term research collaborations with Miguel Otero and his team”.
About the person
Mario Rothbauer studied Biomedical and Tissue Engineering at the FH Technikum Wien and completed his doctorate in Biotechnology at the Universität für Bodenkultur Wien (University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Vienna). Since 2019, he has been head of the Orthopaedic Microsystems Group at the Karl Chiari Lab for Orthopaedic Biology (KCLOB) at MedUni Vienna's Department of Orthopaedics and Trauma Surgery. For more than ten years, he has been working as an academic researcher, consultant and industrial team leader on biotechnological microsystem solutions for molecular research into human diseases from tissue engineering and cellular aspects. His focus is on tissue fibrosis, rheumatoid arthritis and osteoarthritis. As Vice President of the European Society for Alternatives to Animal Testing (EUSAAT), he endeavours to follow the 3Rs principles. The aim of the 3Rs principle is to avoid animal experiments and to limit the number of animals and their suffering in experiments to the indispensable level. Rothbauer develops authentic human tissue models as a complementary technology for in-vivo animal models in biomedical and pharmaceutical research.