April 19, 2007
Debra Schwinn to chair Dept. of Anesthesiology
Debra Schwinn, a leading physician scientist in medical genomics, molecular pharmacology, and cardiac anesthesia, has been named the new chair of the UW Department of Anesthesiology, effective May 1. Schwinn has previously served on the faculty of Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C.
Schwinn is currently the James B. Duke Professor of Anesthesiology at Duke, and holds joint appointments as professor of pharmacology/cancer biology, medicine (cardiology), and surgery. She has directed a large molecular pharmacology laboratory, helped establish the Duke Perioperative Genomics group, and is currently program director for the Cardiovascular Genomics program in the Center for Genomic Medicine, a part of Duke’s Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy. She is a practicing cardiothoracic anesthesiologist, as well as a scientist and leader of research projects.
Schwinn is especially interested in bringing together physician scientists in fields that are strengths for the UW. One such project, in the area known as perioperative genomics, could bring together genomics researchers and vascular specialists to study how patients’ genetic makeup could affect their inflammatory response to heart surgery. Schwinn has led similar studies at Duke and plans to continue that work at the UW.
She also hopes to bring together researchers from other disciplines to form teams to work on so-called translational research, which takes lab results and brings them to the bedside or clinic, and vice-versa. The UW offers a good environment for training clinicians to become physician scientists, Schwinn said, and she is committed to maintaining a vibrant research community for studying fundamental mechanisms in a variety of fields.
Schwinn completed her undergraduate education at the College of Wooster, in Ohio, and then earned her medical degree at Stanford University School of Medicine in California. She completed her internal medicine internship and an anesthesiology fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania. Schwinn has also completed a clinical fellowship in cardiac anesthesiology and a research fellowship in pharmacology at Duke, as well as training in functional genomics/genetics at the National Human Genome Research Institute in Bethesda, Md.
