Josep Rodríguez is one of the young researchers who form part of the IVIO-UPV Chair team. His career as a researcher began when he was finishing his degree in Telecommunications, Image and Sound Engineering, and during his Erasmus stay in Düsseldorf (Germany), where he discovered the range of possibilities offered by the branch of sound and research. To continue advancing in this field, he enrolled in the Master’s Degree in Acoustic Engineering. Currently, he is working on his doctor’s degree with the professors Rubén Picó and Francisco Camarena as his supervisors. His research is centered in the field of ultrasound applied to dentistry, one of the main lines research of the IVIO-UPV Chair.
A typical day in your office consists of…
Every day you face new challenges, problems that you have to solve, one day you can be doing field experiments and another day doing bibliographical research or stinging programing code. I don’t have enough time to be bored, but luckily I like what I’m doing.
What made you decide to go into scientific research?
What inspired me most was the fact that I was doing research in order to contribute to any kind of breakthrough that could benefit society. At the moment we’re working on improving issues dealing with dental implantology, to benefit the dentist who perform them and especially the patient who receives them.
Improving the quality of life for people and society in general, how?
We are working on a monitoring system for bone regeneration in dentistry using ultrasound. This technique directly improves the quality of life of the patient, since the only way to monitor it to date is through radiation (X-rays) that is ionizing and harmful to the patient, or through surgical exploration that is invasive. Our work aims to use the ultrasonic echo-impulse technique so that we can monitor the regeneration process in a non-invasive and non-ionizing way.
About your doctoral thesis
The aim of the thesis is to design a monitoring system for bone regeneration in dentistry. Up until now we had calculated physical parameters using ultrasound, but these are affected by the physical geometry of the physical place we are studying, the human maxilla. For this reason, we are now looking for physical parameters based on the dispersion of the material, where we can do ultrasound measurements in a medium as complex as a human maxilla. When we have tested that we can calculate these parameters with robustness and reliability, the next step will be to design experiments for humans. We will present this research at the UPV Business Forum alongside the experiments we are doing.
In the II edition of the IVIO-UPV Chair Symposium, experts in dentistry presented advances and current techniques in bone regeneration and augmented virtual reality. According to Josep “In a field as multidisciplinary as dentistry, you need to have complementary education, in my case technological, with more biological, physiological and odontological education.When you try to solve a problem it is important to have several points of view.”
Recently, Josep presented the latest advances of his research in the seminar “Applications of Tribocorrosion and Materials for Dental Implants” with his paper titled “Bone Regeneration Process Monitoring for Dental Application“. According to Josep “It was very interesting to see other fields related to the dentistry and implantology that are working on advances. You discover new perspectives that can be useful tp your research,” he concludes.
More information and questions regarding the IVIO-UPV Chair research projects can be addressed in writing to Francisco Camarena, a research professor at the Campus Gandia of the UPV: fracafe@fis.upv.es.
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