Gary J. Schwartz
<p>Gary J. Schwartz, Ph.D., studies how the gut and the brain interact with each other to regulate food intake and associated metabolic processes. Dr. Schwartz and his colleagues aim to identify therapeutic targets for eating behaviors associated with obesity, diabetes and related diseases.</p>
<p>Our research focuses on the sensory neural controls of energy homeostasis in health and disease. We use rodent models to examine how food stimuli act at oral and gastrointestinal sites to affect food intake, energy balance, and gastrointestinal physiology.We approach this problem from multiple levels of analysis including behavioral, physiological, neurophysiological, and molecular-genetic. We have identified the type of food stimuli that activate vagal and splanchnic sensory fibers supplying the gut, and have revealed the extent to which these stimuli influence gut-brain communication. Our most recent efforts involve the analysis of gut-brain communication in the control of energy homeostasis in mouse models of obesity and diabetes.We have identified neurons in the periphery, brainstem and hypothalamus that integrate food-elicited signals with peptide signals that have profound effects food intake and metabolism. Data from these studies reveal that central hypothalamic and brainstem neuropeptides affect food intake and body weight by modulating the neural potency of food stimulated signals from the mouth and gut. This novel, synthetic conceptual framework is critical because it links forebrain hypothalamic structures, long known to be involved in the control of energy balance, to the sensory and motor systems in the brainstem that control ingestion, digestion, and metabolic processing of food. Future studies will use genetic mouse models of obesity and diabetes with targeted conditional neuropeptide/ receptor knockdown or replacement to determine how central neuropeptide signaling affects the neural processing of metabolic sensory signals critical to energy homeostasis.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 15.6pt;"><span style="font-size: 9.0pt;">Dr. Schwartz studies how the gut and the brain act together to determine how much people eat. He has identified sites in the gastrointestinal tract and brain that detect nutrients and has discovered how these regions are linked to food intake, obesity and diabetes. He also studies gastric-bypass surgery and the key neural and hormonal mechanisms responsible for the significant and long-lasting improvements in body weight, food intake and diabetes following the procedure.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 15.6pt;"><span style="font-size: 9.0pt;">Dr. Schwartz is Director of the Einstein-Mount Sinai Diabetes Research Center Animal Physiology Core at Einstein and Director of the Animal Phenotyping Core of the Columbia University- Einstein New York Obesity Research Center. He also serves on multiple NIH study sections and on scientific grant review panels of the United States Department of Veterans Affairs, American Diabetes Association, Endocrine Fellows Foundation and Obesity Society. He is a member of the editorial boards of several journals, including <em>Diabetes</em>, <em>Endocrinology </em>and serves as an associate editor of the <em>American Journal of Physiology, Endocrinology & Metabolism Section</em>.</span></p>