Bezerra Named Director of Division of Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition
Jorge Bezerra, MD , is the new director of the Division of Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center. In this role, he will provide leadership for the Division's well-funded research programs, state-of-the-art clinical centers, and a faculty that includes 32 physicians and eight PhDs.
Dr. Bezerra earned his medical degree from the Federal University Rio Grande Norte, Natal, Brazil, and completed his residency in pediatrics at the University of Arizona in Tucson. He joined Cincinnati Children's in 1990, when he began his fellowship training in pediatric gastroenterology, hepatology and nutrition. He was appointed to the Division in 1994 as an assistant professor of pediatrics, and is currently a professor in the University of Cincinnati Department of Pediatrics, which is ranked number three in the country among pediatric medicine training programs by U.S. News & World Report.
"It has been a privilege to be part of this Division for 25 years, and I am honored to serve as its director," Dr. Bezerra says. "My goal is to build on our tradition of providing the best possible care for children with digestive disease. This will mean continually improving our existing models of care, pursuing research that increases our knowledge so that we can design new prevention and treatment strategies, and training future GI specialists through our National Institutes of Health-funded fellowship program."
In addition to his role as Division director, Dr. Bezerra is medical director of the Cincinnati Children's Pediatric Liver Care Center, and sees patients in the outpatient liver clinic. He has an active research career, with primary interests in molecular control of biliary atresia, genetic basis of liver disease, and tissue engineering.
"Building on the Division's commitment to collaboration is vital to its growth and productivity," says Dr. Bezerra. "We will continue to pursue partnerships at the local, national and international level, a strategy that has been very fruitful for us to improve patient care and lead on innovation in recent years," he explains. "For example, such collaboration and teamwork have led to key findings about how the intestinal microbiome may influence gene function to modulate the severity of inflammatory bowel disease. It also has helped us make critical contributions in the treatment of metabolic liver disease and biliary atresia."
Dr. Bezerra points to a recent multicenter study he led demonstrating that using high doses of steroids to treat infants with biliary atresia after the Kasai procedure fails to improve medical outcomes, and is associated with earlier onset of serious adverse events. ( Journal of the American Medical Association, May 7, 2014)
Dr. Bezerra is also the Director of the Digestive Health Center, which is funded by the National Institutes of Health to catalyze multidisciplinary research at Cincinnati Children's and the University of Cincinnati. Key discoveries of Center investigators include using stem cells to engineer small functional units of human intestine and stomach. He has been elected as a Councilor of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases (AASLD) and is a member of the prestigious American Society for Clinical Investigation and Association of American Physicians. Dr. Bezerra serves as an associate editor for the AASLD's journal, Hepatology, and has written more than 114 peer-reviewed publications and 41 book chapters.
View Dr. Bezerra's full bio here.