It is my distinct pleasure to announce that Robert E. Schwartz, MD, PhD, will be the new Chief of the Division of Gastroenterology in the Department of Medicine at Washington University School of Medicine (WashU Medicine), effective October 6, 2026.
Dr. Schwartz is currently Professor of Medicine, Physiology, Biophysics, and Systems Biology at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City, and Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Cornell University (by courtesy) in Ithaca, NY. He also serves as an Associate Attending Physician at New York-Presbyterian Hospital.
Dr. Schwartz is an outstanding gastroenterologist, hepatologist, and an internationally recognized physician-scientist in stem cell biology and infectious disease modeling.
Dr. Schwartz completed his undergraduate training at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York, where he earned a Bachelor of Engineering. He received his MD and PhD in Biomedical Engineering in the Medical Scientist Training Program at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Schwartz returns to familiar ground at WashU Medicine, having completed his medicine internship and residency here at Barnes-Jewish Hospital / WashU, where he received the Gregory J. Gurtner Internal Medicine Residency Research Award. He went on to complete his fellowship training in Gastroenterology and Hepatology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston, followed by a postdoctoral research fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Dr. Schwartz began his academic faculty career in Internal Medicine at Harvard Medical School. In 2014, he was recruited to Weill Cornell Medicine as a physician scientist in the GI division, expanding his research in hepatology and infectious disease, while maintaining a robust clinical practice as an attending physician doing inpatient GI consults, hepatology clinic and endoscopy.
As an exceptional physician-scientist, Dr. Schwartz has made seminal contributions to the fields of hepatic stem cell differentiation, viral hepatitis, and tissue engineering. He was among the first to successfully differentiate pluripotent stem cells into functional hepatocyte-like cells to model complex liver physiology. His lab has uniquely leveraged these bioengineered platforms to study challenging host-pathogen interactions for hepatotropic infections including Hepatitis B, C, and D. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Schwartz co-led major collaborative, multi-institutional efforts utilizing human pluripotent stem cell-derived organoid platforms to map SARS-CoV-2 cellular tropism and identify crucial antiviral inhibitors for drug repurposing trials. His extensive research enterprise is supported by multiple grants from the NIDDK, NIAID, Department of Defense, NASA, and various private foundations, including the Gastro-Intestinal Research Foundation. He holds several patents for clinical technologies such as CRISPR-Cas systems targeting HBV and viral diseases and has published extensively in premier scientific journals, including Nature, Cell, Cell Stem Cell, Science Translational Medicine, PNAS, Gastroenterology, and Hepatology.
Dr. Schwartz is deeply committed to institutional leadership, GI research, clinical programs, medical education, and professional service. Beyond serving on the editorial board of the Journal of Hepatology and previously for Hepatology, he serves on the external advisory boards of multiple major digestive disease research centers across the United States. He is also highly active in national societies, holding multiple leadership roles within the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases (AASLD) and the American Gastroenterological Association (AGA) on research policy committees and research awards panels.
Reflecting a stellar track record of dedication to faculty development and training the next generation of researchers, Dr. Schwartz acts as a formal mentor on numerous institutional and mentored trainee grants, including NIH T32, K08, and K23 awards. His laboratory has successfully trained a network of postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, and undergraduate researchers, helping junior faculty secure independent funding and helping research technicians’ transition successfully into top-tier medical and graduate programs.
Dr. Schwartz’s excellence has been recognized with numerous prestigious honors, including being elected as a member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation (ASCI), and being named a Fellow of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases and an American Gastroenterological Association Fellow. He is also a recipient of the ASCI Young Physician-Scientist Award and the Weill Cornell Young Investigator Award.
Please join me in welcoming Dr. Schwartz back to St. Louis and to his new leadership role as the Division Chief of Gastroenterology at WashU Medicine.
I also want to thank Dr. Nick Davidson for his exceptional leadership of the GI division for more than two decades. After a distinguished career as chief, Dr. Davidson will be focusing on leading the Digestive Disease Research Center and his own research. Dr. Davidson has been incredibly successful at WashU making major contributions to the research, clinical and educational programs in the GI division, the Department of Medicine and Siteman Cancer Center.
Under Dr. Davidson’s leadership the GI division has grown significantly with outstanding clinical programs in advanced endoscopy, hepatology, liver transplant, IBD, motility, General GI, and foregut disorders among others. The division now has clinical programs at BJH, BJWC, South County and Missouri Baptist. Nick oversaw the growth and success of the GI training programs including a very successful GI fellowship and subspecialty fellowships in IBD, hepatology and advanced endoscopy among others. Nick recruited a large number of physician scientists and the division’s research portfolio thrived under Nick’s careful watch including the success of the longstanding T32, recently renewed NIDDK funded Digestive Disease Research Center and diverse basic, clinical and translational research programs. He has clearly made the division a better place.