Klaus Fassbender has worked at the Department of Rheumatology, at the University Basel, Switzerland, the Max Planck Institute for Psychiatry, Munich, Germany, the Department of Neurology at the University of Mannheim, Germany, and at the University of Goettingen, Germany. In 2005, he became Chairman of the Department of Neurology, University of the Saarland, Germany, where he was also vice-president of the University in 2007–09, and was co-founder of the German Institute of Dementia Prevention in 2008. He works on defining the effects of innate immune responses in Alzheimer's disease and on how to improve acute stroke management.