Personal Profile
He is a Full Professor at the University of Oxford and he holds further academic appointments as Professor of Ophthalmology at the University of Tübingen, Germany and the University of Lausanne, Switzerland.
Professor Fischer lives in Buckinghamshire with his family and enjoys running in the beautiful Chiltern Hills while training for the next marathon. Through his running, he is raising funds for The Guide Dogs for the Blind Association.
He supported his undergraduate training by working for the Bavarian State Opera and taking on night shifts at the University Hospital until he received an academic merit scholarship by the Naumann Foundation within the first year of medical school.
His interest in biomedical research led him to the Department of Physiology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was awarded a University Research Fellowship in 2000-2002 to study the mechanisms of extraocular muscles escaping degeneration in Duchenne’s Muscular Dystrophy. His work was published in the canonical textbook Myology and in peer reviewed research journals. The Myasthenia Gravis Foundation awarded him with a Henry R Viets Medal and Fellowship.
He completed is medical school training in Germany, Australia, and Switzerland and was awarded his medical doctorate with distinction (summa cum laude) in 2007.
His studies at the University of Zurich led him to Ophthalmology exploring optical coherence tomography and inherited retinal diseases. It led him to take up a training post at one of the pre-eminent academic centres in Ophthalmology, the Centre for Ophthalmology in Tübingen, Germany.
He completed his specialty and subspecialty training with Ulrich Bartz-Schmidt (medical and surgical retina) and Eberhart Zrenner (ophthalmic genetics and translational research) in Tübingen, Germany. In these formative years, Professor Fischer was awarded further accolades including the 2008 NIH Young Investigator Award by the US National Eye Institute and the Foundation Fighting Blindness and the 2010 Career Development Award by the Karin and Ewald Hochbaum Foundation.
When Professor Fischer past his board exams at the national and European level in 2012, he became one of the youngest Fellows of the European Board of Ophthalmologists and member of the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Tübingen.
In the same year, he received a prestigious Clinical Research Training Fellowship by the UK Medical Research Council and was accepted as postgraduate student at Merton College for formal research training under supervision by Professor Robert MacLaren. While reading Clinical Neuroscience at this top Oxford College, he enjoyed rowing for the Merton College Boat Club.
In 2016 he received his second doctorate (DPhil) for developing a new form of retinal gene therapy. The treatment was patented by the University of Oxford and licensed out for testing in clinical trials.
For this and other achievements, he received many further awards, among them the Leonhard Klein award for the advancement of vitreoretinal surgery and the Senator H. Wacker award for scientific contributions to the field of retinal disease.
During his subspecialty training fellowships in medical & surgical retina and genetics (2015-2018), he managed to establish his own research laboratory with substantial funding from the German Research Foundation and other competitive funding bodies. In 2019, he was appointed Chief Investigator of the first global post approval safety study for ocular gene therapy.
As key opinion leader in the field, he currently serves on the advisory board of patient advocacy groups focused on informing, guiding and empowering patients. He also serves as consultant and/or on the advisory board of various biotech and pharmaceutical companies and has been expert advisor to governmental regulators and University institutions.
As seasoned ophthalmic surgeon, Professor Fischer is often tasked with training other surgeons across the world in the specific challenges of retinal gene therapy surgery, for example as Faculty of the European School for Advanced Studies in Ophthalmology.
In his career so far, he has given over 100 invited lectures, written more than 100 peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals and edited many more.
