Berliner Professor studies how blood flow stimulates the formation of new arteries

Martin A. Schwartz, Ph.D., the newly named Robert Berliner Professor of Cardiology, is a noted cardiovascular researcher whose studies of cell adhesion and behavior have led to new insights into atherosclerosis and heart disease.

Professor of medicine and cell biology, Schwartz is affiliated with the Vascular Biology and Therapeutics Program. He is an expert on mechanotransduction—how cells respond to mechanical forces—and his lab’s main focus is understanding how the friction of flowing blood against the endothelial cells lining blood vessels regulates the behavior of these cells, including how increased flow leads to the growth of new arteries.

Schwartz earned his Ph.D. in physical chemistry from Stanford University. He conducted postdoctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and joined the faculty of Harvard Medical School in 1983. In 1991, he moved to the Scripps Research Institute, and then the University of Virginia. He joined the Yale faculty in 2011.

Schwartz is part of a team at the Yale Cardiovascular Research Center that received a five-year, $9.5 million grant from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute to study the molecular basis of artery formation and develop a new framework for therapeutic advances.

The professorship is named for Robert W. Berliner, M.D., a renowned kidney researcher and dean of the School of Medicine from 1973 to 1983.