Professor Andrea O’Connor, BE(Hons), PhD, FIChemE is the Shanahan Chair in Frontier Medical Solutions and a Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor at the University of Melbourne and the Aikenhead Centre for Medical Discovery. She was a Fulbright Scholar at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1995-96 prior to commencing her academic position at the University of Melbourne.
Andrea leads the Tissue Engineering Group in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. Her research focuses on design, synthesis and fabrication of biomaterials, porous materials and antimicrobial nanomaterials. She is particularly interested in strategies for scale-up of tissue engineering including vascularisation, and design of antimicrobial materials for medical implants. She has published over 90 journal articles, lectured on tissue engineering and biofabrication at the Bayreuth International Summer School, Germany, and was a finalist in the Graeme Clark Institute HealthTech Innovation Challenge. Andrea also led the engineering team on the world-first Neopec clinical trial of breast reconstruction using tissue engineering with collaborators at the O’Brien Institute, St Vincent’s Institute, showing proof-of-principle of tissue engineering of large volumes of well vascularised fat tissue. She collaborates with clinicians, scientists, hospitals, medical research institutes and medical device companies to improve existing products, develop new devices, and solve clinical problems.