Dr. ir. José Manuel Rivera Arbeláez received his BSc in Biomedical Engineering from Autónoma de Occidente University, Colombia. He did his MSc in Advance Therapies and Biomedicine in Madrid, Spain at the Francisco de Vitoria University, and obtained his PhD from the University of Twente, the Netherlands; under the supervision of Prof. Albert van den Berg and Prof. Robert Passier, working on developing a heart-on-chip model for drug discovery and disease modeling. 

From February 2023 onwards he works at the BIOS Lab on a chip group and Applied Stem Cell Technologies (AST), as a postdoctoral researcher. His work focuses mainly on developing a 3D cardiac in vitro model for drug discovery and disease modeling.