Pola Goldberg Oppenheimer is a Professor in Micro-Engineering and Bio-Nanotechnology at the School of Chemical Engineering and the Healthcare Technologies Institute. Professor Oppenheimer leads an interdisciplinary research group (www.ANMSA.com) at the University of Birmingham, closely working with the clinical teams at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital and Birmingham Enterprise, the University’s technology transfer specialists. Her group's research programme is targeted at exploring the frontiers of nanoengineering while bridging the gap between nano-to-macroscopic-level understanding and implementations of novel hybrid and nanocomposite materials and submicron structures for miniaturised functional devices for advanced healthcare applications. Professor Oppenheimer is developing cutting-edge Engineering solutions to tackle major medical problems.

The importance of her developments to the engineering has been recognised by being featured as a frontispiece and highlighted in leading journals and the BBC news and radio press releases. Prof. Oppenheimer holds funding from the Royal Academy of Engineering, EPSRC, EU Consolidator Grant and the Wellcome Trust. Her research in the field of novel biomedical engineering for miniaturised devices and their applied potential is internationally and nationally recognised and led to invitations to present her work at major conferences and seminars as well as an invitation to write a book reviewing her pioneering patterning technique and its applications. Her publications include regular high-profile papers in leading journals (e.g., Nature Biomedical Engineering, Science Advances, Advanced Materials) and she has been a recipient of several prestigious awards, including the Carl-Zeiss Award in Engineering at the University of Cambridge, resulting in extensive media exposure with accolade for her work was its selection to illustrate the front cover of a number of important publications including the Cambridge Science Magazine and the 2012 Annual Report. I She was invited as an envoy in the House of Commons Science & Technology Committee at the ‘Voice of the Future’ with Government Ministers of State for Science, Research and Innovation, featured in the ‘Birmingham Heroes in Healthcare Technologies’ Campaign and selected to the ‘Parliamentary Engineering Group’ at the House of Lords.