General Secretary -Fabian Blank

General Secretary

Fabian Blank, PhD (Switzerland)

Since 2012, Fabian Blank has been working as a group leader in the Pulmonary Medicine Research Laboratory (University Hospital Bern), which is part of the Department of BioMedical Research (DBMR). His research focuses on the effects of biomedical and environmental nanoparticles on the pulmonary immune system. In particular, he works with in vitro and animal models of respiratory diseases such as asthma, COPD and idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.

He is also head of the Live Cell Imaging Microscopy Core Facility at DBMR. Fabian Blank received his MSc in Cell Biology (2003) and PhD in the field of in vitro particle-lung interactions (2006) in the research group of Prof. Peter Gehr and Dr. Barbara Rothen-Rutishauser at the Institute of Anatomy at the University of Bern, where he continued his studies as a postdoc (2007-2008). He then joined the Telethon Institute for Child Health Research, Perth (AU) to study the effects of nanoparticles on the pulmonary immune system in vivo (2008-2009) before joining the DBMR at the University of Bern.

Since starting his research career in particle-lung interactions, Dr Blank has been very active in the ISAM community, participating in a number of conferences with scientific poster and oral presentations. He received the ISAM Student Research Award at the 2005 ISAM conference in Perth (WA). Between 2013 and 2015 he was a member of the ISAM Student Committee. In 2019, Dr Blank co-chaired the organisation of the ISAM Conference in Montreux, Switzerland (Conference Chair: Barbara Rothen-Rutishauser). At this conference, he became a member of the ISAM Awards Committee and co-chair of the Environmental/Occupational Health/Toxicology Networking Group. In 2021 he became a member of the ISAM Board.

Within the ISAM society, Dr Blank aims to represent basic science with an emphasis on in vitro and in vivo testing of environmental and biomedical nanoparticles, with a particular focus on the pulmonary immune system. With this scientific background, he represents a relevant branch of research for aerosols in medicine.