Robert J. Schwartz, Ph.D.

Director, Institute for Biosciences and Technology

Robert J. Schwartz, Ph.D., is director of the Texas A&M Health Science Center Institute of Biosciences and Technology, located in Houston in the Texas Medical Center. He also directs the recently established Center for Molecular Development and Diseases at HSC-IBT. Dr. Schwartz previously was at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, where he served as a tenured professor in the departments of cell biology, molecular and cellular biology, medicine, and molecular physiology. He also was co-director of the Baylor College of Medicine Center for Cardiovascular Development and had a presidential endowment. During his more than 30 years at Baylor, Dr. Schwartz became widely recognized for his research on the developmental and genetic aspects of congenital heart disease. He studies the way in which genes that create the heart are first turned on and function and seeks to apply the knowledge of how the heart is normally made to generating new heart cells for diseased or damaged hearts. In this field, he has received seven U.S. patents and co-founded three companies. The research by Dr. Schwartz has been supported by numerous large, long-term grants. In October 2004, he - along with five other scientists who serve as principal investigators - received a $6 million, five-year grant from Foundation Leduq, based in Paris. This grant sets up a transatlantic effort to study ways to help damaged hearts repair themselves, using stem cells from bone marrow, bloodstream and adult heart tissue. In addition, he is in the 11th year of a $10-million program project grant from the National Institutes of Health to investigate genetic approaches to early cardiac development. Dr. Schwartz received his bachelor's degree from Brooklyn College and his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. After serving as a teaching fellow there and holding a postdoctoral fellowship, he joined the laboratory of Dr. Bert W. O'Malley in the Department of Cell Biology at Baylor College of Medicine as a research associate and rose steadily through the professorial ranks.