Bio
Dr Schwartz is the Henry Kaufmann Professor of Surgery and Vice-Chair for Liver Surgery and Transplantation in the Department of Surgery and the Recanati-Miller Transplantation Institute at the Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York. After completing medical school at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia in 1976, Dr Schwartz did a rotating internship at The Mercy Catholic Medical Center in Philadelphia and joined the National Health Service Corps as Director of the Craigsville Medical Center in rural Virginia where he ran a very general practice as the only physician within a 40-mile radius. Dr Schwartz then moved to New York to begin a year of religious studies at Yeshivat Sh'or Yoshuv, after which he came to Mount Sinai in 1981 and has remained ever since. After completing surgical residency in 1986 and vascular surgery fellowship in 1987, he joined the faculty where he began working with Dr Charles Miller, a colleague who had been chosen to lead the development of the Liver Transplant Program at Mount Sinai. On Labor Day, 1988, Dr Schwartz and Dr Miller performed the first liver transplant in the State of New York, and the Program rapidly grew to the point where in 1989 Dr Schwartz directed his full attention to liver transplantation. The Mount Sinai Liver Transplant Program rose to be the second-largest in the world with over 3,000 transplants performed, and over the years Dr Schwartz served in a variety of roles including Director of both Pediatric and Adult Liver Transplantation. As patients with liver cancer were drawn to Mount Sinai, Dr Schwartz increasingly began to take an interest in this area from both a clinical and a research standpoint, creating a Division of Hepatobiliary Surgery where he applied techniques drawn from liver transplantation to develop novel approaches to complex surgery of the liver, bile ducts, and pancreas. Dr Schwartz's clinical research in liver cancer culminated in 2002 with a five year K-24 mid-career investigator award from the NIH entitled, "Systematic integration of patient-oriented research into the clinical pathway for hepatocellular carcinoma". With the large clinical volume and the research-friendly environment that had been established, Dr Schwartz was successful in attracting Josep Llovet, perhaps the leading translational scientist in the field of liver cancer, from Barcelona. Together they established The Mount Sinai Liver Cancer Program, with a translational research laboratory based at Mount Sinai and with international collaborations that is now recognized as leading the field of liver cancer genomics worldwide. Dr Schwartz has published over 250 papers in peer-reviewed journals and 20 book chapters, and frequently lectures on topics related to hepatobiliary cancer, liver surgery, and transplantation around the world.
