Camila Vesga talks about her research in the Tissue Engineering group at the event "Women scientists of yesterday and today".

Camila Vesga, postdoctoral researcher at TecnunCamila Vesga, has participated in the event "Women scientists of yesterday and today". The goal of the event, also framed within the initiative Emakumeak Zientzianinitiative, is to make research visible and pay tribute to some of the great women scientists in history. Specifically, Camila spoke about some of the contributions of botanist Ynex Mexia (1870), known for her large collection of new specimens.

Within this group, one of its main lines of research is the creation of in vitro models, which are laboratory models for different tissues and studies of their diseases. In his case, he develops new models of skeletal muscle. "What we want is to replicate muscle tissue in the laboratory and for this we divide it into two; 2D models and 3D models. For the 2D models we replicate a muscle fiber, while for the 3D models we want to have several fibers and the whole volume of a muscle", Camila explained to the auditorium of the conference room Club of Victoria Eugenia, where the event took place.

Within the roundtable with other researchers they asked her why her research is so important. Camila answered them with a question: Do you know how much muscle we have in our body, 10%, 30%, 40%? And she herself answered: muscle represents almost 40% of our body mass, that's a lot, and it is also vital in processes such as breathing, locomotion, etc. "Currently what we are looking for is to have a very good model to study the muscle and its diseases, for this can be used to culture muscle for transplantation to a person who has had an accident for example," explained Camila.

After discussing her research, Camila introduced the audience to Ynes Mexia, one of the most important botanists of the 20th century. Vesga showed the attendees one of the samples from her collection: "She collected them, dried them and then described them; where she found them, at what altitude and in what conditions. She showed two of them collected in Mexico. Given the large volume of species she collected, there are many plants named after her," she concluded.

Camila is from Bogota (Colombia) and studied there Degree in Biomedical Engineering. After finishing, she traveled to San Sebastian to study the Master's degree in Biomedical Engineering at Tecnun and later did her PhD at the School. D. in the Tissue Engineering group, where she is currently a postdoctoral researcher.