Dr. Blanchard is a Professor in Pediatrics at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and the Director of the University of Maryland Brain and Tissue Bank, a tissue repository of the NIH NeuroBioBank. As Director of the Bank, he supports efforts by the neuroscience community to make meaningful advances in our understanding of brain function and pathogenesis in human tissue, and is able to work collaboratively with diverse groups of investigators to support high-impact, large-scale studies prioritized by the NIH.

Dr. Blanchard earned a Ph.D. in Cellular and Molecular Biology at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and a J.D. from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. He is an accomplished scientist and has been a funded investigator since 1997 in varied disciplines, including immunology of infectious disease, cancer cell signaling and induced cell death, and brain cell pathology in adult neurologic disease processes.

As an early-career investigator, he studied both viral and bacterial pathogen infections of mucosal surfaces, including the gastrointestinal tract, the lungs, and the upper respiratory system, with a focus on developing oral vaccine strategies and novel carrier and adjuvant systems. More recent studies have involved the investigation of novel compounds to selectively induce cell death in cancer cell lines and organoids, with a concentration on the regulation of the cell cycle arrest and the induction of apoptosis. He currently works collaboratively in the study of post-mortem brain tissue to evaluate changes in brain tissue morphology and pathogenesis in models that include COVID-19 infection and Alzheimer’s disease.

He began his association with the University of Maryland Brain and Tissue Bank in 2014, monitoring quality control, and was appointed Director of the Bank in 2017. As Director of the Bank, he participates in multiple multisite studies on large-scale projects to benefit the scientific community. He is also a co-investigator for the tissue procurement and distribution aspect of two major NIH initiatives, the Developmental Genotype-Tissue Expression (dGTEx) study and the Somatic Mutation across Human Tissue (SMaHT) study, aimed at providing detailed molecular analysis of multiple human tissues for the benefit of the wider scientific community. He also cooperates with the other brain banks in the NIH NeuroBioBank network to build the Human Brain Cell Atlas Collection of post-mortem brains dedicated to the cellular mapping of the human brain.