Cigarette Smoke Toxicity – Linking Individual Chemicals to Human Diseases

David Bernhard gained his PhD degree in microbiology at the University of Innsbruck, Faculty of Medicine, and the Tyrolean Cancer Research Institute, Austria. After a scientific stay abroad he served as a postdoc at the Institute of Biomedical Aging Research of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, by which time he was already focusing on the effects of cigarette smole on the cardiovascular system. Following another postdoc period at the Institute for Pathophysiology of the Medical University in Innsbruck, he became head of the university's cardiac surgery research laboratory, and expanded his research towards a more application-oriented field. Currently Dr. Bernhard is head of the cardiac surgery research laboratory at the Medical University of Vienna, Austria, where his major fields of interest are the pathophysiological understanding of smoking and metal ion-induced atherosclerosis, as well as the search for natural compounds in the treatment of cardiovascular dieseases, while he has recently started work on tissue engineering projects in the cardiovascular setting.