Mercedes Balcells: MIT civil servant? No way!

“Who said that girls aren’t into engineering?” The engineer Mercedes Balcells, a pioneer in biomechanics and high-flying researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), asks the question and then points to herself, because she is the living proof that anyone who says so is totally wrong.

Balcells excelled very early along with a handful of young female engineers at the Institut Químic de Sarrià (IQS). Another of the talented young women from the class and Mercedes got pregnant at the same time, but her colleague’s baby was born with just one ear, so they founded Regenear (a fusion of the words regenerate and ear).

Regenear is a start-up conceived to market biomechanical prototypes and human tissues and organs which Balcells and her team perfect between the MIT and the IQS, between Boston and Barcelona. It is a promising biotechnological bridge, and is the cornerstone of the agreement with the MIT for young researchers from Catalonia to swap companies and glean experience with the best scientists from the prestigious research centre in Massachusetts.

It was Balcells who convinced the MIT executives to commit to Barcelona in their expansion projects: “I had to deal with the typical Spanish siesta and fiesta clichés”, she explains. However, her gift of the gab helped her to get past all that, because she had already won over the academic authorities of Massachusetts with a PhD taken in Germany (“it was a chance to learn German”) and a flying visit to Boston with the last few euros from her “la Caixa” Fulbright scholarship.

“MIT is where the legends of biomechanics, a speciality which fascinated me, work, so I just hopped on a plane from Germany to Boston and started to knock on their office doors without an appointment or even talking to secretaries. Quite simply, the world’s best engineers answered when I knocked, I told them who I was and we arranged to meet another day. I ended up utterly fascinated by their work and I prolonged my visit until I got an appointment with the dean… And now I’m one of them, a staff researcher.”

Civil servant? “No way! At MIT they don’t know the meaning of the word: every year they review your performance and your plans, and if they want to keep you on they do; otherwise you receive a letter from the provost, and then you know it’s time to look for something else. But that doesn’t worry me, because I have every intention of continuing to give my all, shoulder to shoulder with the best.”