Dr Sabrina Sofia Burgener

Dr. Sabrina Sofia Burgener is a Senior Research Fellow in Immunology at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience at The University of Queensland.

Dr. Burgener has over 12 years of research experience with the main focus on rodent in vivo inflammation models. Her research career to date has focused on multiple levels of innate immunity; 1) protease-induce chronic inflammation, 2) neutrophil and monocytes sensing infection and 3) cytoprotective intracellular mechanism within neutrophils preventing cell death.

After obtaining her professional training as a Veterinary Technician, Sabrina Sofia Burgener completed her PhD in Immunology under supervision of A/Prof. Charafa Benarafa at the University of Bern, Switzerland in 2017.

For her work on the cytoprotective role of Serpinb1 and Serpinb6 in neutrophils she received several international awards such as the Society of Leukocyte Biology Presidential Award in 2016 and the Dr. Lutz Zwillenberg Prize in 2020. Before joining the Inflammasome Lab in 2019, Sabrina had been a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute of Virology and Immunology at the Vetsuisse Faculty of the University of Bern. In the Schroder lab, Sabrina is highly interested in understanding how caspase-1 drives inflammatory diseases and if targeting caspase-1 in diseases such as non-alcoholic steatohepatitis and Alzheimer's disease comes at the cost of increased susceptibility to infection. Her research is funded by SNSF Postdoc Mobility Fellowship (2020-2022) and the Novartis Foundation for Medical-Biological Research Fellowship (2022-2023).