Prof. Dr. Peter WICKH-Index: 61
Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology – Empa & ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Positions: Head of Laboratory for Nanomaterials in Health, Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology – Empa and Adjunct Professor, Health Science and Technology Department, ETH Zurich, St. Gallen, Switzerland
Specialization: Interactions of nanomaterials with human tissues; Nano safety and nanobiomedicine.
At the NANOCON´25 conference Peter Wick will open the Session C – Bionanotechnology, Nanomaterials in Medicine by his invited talk “Innovating low dimensional materials for health applications: balancing performance and safety”.
Personal Background and Education:
Peter Wick (*1971) got the Diploma Degree in Biology in 1997 and the PhD in 2002 (PhD Thesis focused on cellular-and molecular biology), both at University of Fribourg, Switzerland. In the period 2005-2010 he received also education in toxicology. Since 2002 he works at the Empa, St. Gallen, in various positions – as the Deputy Group leader of the MaTisMed at the Laboatory for Biocompatible Materials (2002-2007), Deputy Group leader of the Nanointercell of Materials at the Laboratory of Biology Interactions (2007-2009), group leader of Nanointercell (2009-2010), Co-head Lab for Materials-Biology interactions (2010-2014) and head of Laboratory for Nanomaterials in Health (since 2014).
Since 2023 he is also Adjunct Professor at ETH, Zurich, Dep. of Health Science and Technology.
In the period 2020-2022 he was a member of the Swiss National COVID-19 Science Task Force, he is Inventor and Director of the Swiss Contactpointnano.ch, Member of the Working Party Nano at EDQM, and was Steering Board member of the Swiss Action plan for Synthetic Nanomaterials.
Research interests:
Research interests of Peter Wick's Laboratory are focused on the development of safe and sustainable (nano)materials designs and concepts for precision health solutions exploring 2D materials and nanomaterials-enabled advanced materials. His Nanointercell (NiCe) group studies the interactions of nanomaterials with human tissues including barrier tissue in vitro and ex vivo with the purpose to obtain detailed mechanistic understanding about their uptake, accumulation, biotransformation, transport and effect on different types of cells systems and entire tissue need for efficacy and safety assessment of nanomaterials and development of innovative nanomedicines.
Research activities of Peter Wicks´s group are explicitly:
- Biological impact of nanomaterials and release of nanoparticles after mechanical treatments;
- Antimicrobial and antiviral solutions;
- Mechanism of action of injectable nanomedicines;
- Human advanced in vitro models – a glioblastoma-on-chip model and skin, lung or blood tissue; barrier – the group investigates in state-of-the-art advanced human co-culture in vitro models needed for the hazard assessment of emerging advanced materials;
- Imaging methods – the development of robust and reliable measurements to estimate with high confidence the physical-chemical properties as well as the potential adverse biological effects.
Summary of publication activity:
Author/co-author of 175 papers in international peer-reviewed journals and three book chapters; The number of total citations >17.500 and H-index: 61 (Google Scholar, Feb. 2025); ORCID ID 
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