Founder & CTO

Dr. Mehmet Gurdal, PhD

Dr Mehmet Gürdal is a bioengineer with a PhD specialising in the field of corneal bioengineering. He graduated from the Faculty of Engineering, Department of Bioengineering in 2011. His general research interest focuses on tissue engineering, cellular therapies and he has over 10 years of experience in limbal stem cell ranslational science. During his PhD, he participated in innovative translational research that used ex vivo expanded autologous corneal stem cells in patients. He received an individual fellowship from TUBITAK to complete his PhD thesis in the Republic of Ireland, University of Galway for 12 months. After completing 12 months, University of Galway offered him an additional 12 months fellowship to continue his work within the university. Immediately after his PhD, Dr Gurdal has been successful on the Government of Ireland Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship that is a highly competitive call with less than 5% success rate. Dr Gurdal worked as a ostdoctoral researcher at University of Galway and University College Dublin (UCD) for more than 2 years under the Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship Programme. In Ireland, Dr Gurdal worked on the development of full-thickness native-like human cornea using adipose tissue derived mesenchymal cells, amniotic membrane derived mesenchymal cells and corneal fibroblasts through scaffold-free tissue engineering approaches. He has been involved in 6 projects about the translational science of limbal stem cells, four of them funded by The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey. He received 6 fellowships (from Ireland and Turkey) which are the most prestigious programmes, during his academic life. He has 15 international papers published in various journals. Dr Gurdal also co-founded LIMBUSTEM as a start-up to develop and commercialise a personalised cellular therapy product for limbal stem cell deficiency.