My profile on the CIR website

Prof Schwarze (FRCPCH) is the Edward Clark Chair of Child Life and Health at the University of Edinburgh, a paediatrician specialised in allergist and respiratory medicine, and an internationally recognised expert in immune mechanisms of RSV bronchiolitis and associated airway allergy.  

Dr Schwarze qualified in Medicine from Freiburg University, Germany in 1988, trained as a paediatrician specialising in paediatric respiratory medicine and paediatric allergy and he now leads the paediatric allergy service at the Royal Hospital for Sick Children Edinburgh and is the clinical lead for the national Children’s and Young People’s Allergy Network Scotland.

In 1994, as a post-doctoral fellow at National Jewish Medical and Research Centre in Denver, Colorado, Dr Schwarze started to work on immune responses in RSV bronchiolitis and allergic airway disease. He continued his research at the Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany, and from 2002 to 2007 at Imperial College London where, as a Wellcome Trust Senior Fellow, he focused his research on the role of lung dendritic cells in respiratory viral infections and subsequent reactive airway disease. In 2007 he moved to the MRC-Centre for Inflammation Research at the University of Edinburgh and took up his current Chair in 2008.

Professor Schwarze’s research programme aims to understand mechanisms of inflammation at the interface of innate and adaptive immunity in respiratory viral infections to help develop urgently required treatments for viral bronchiolitis in infants and virus driven asthma exacerbations. He uses both pre-clinical models and clinical samples to investigate the roles of lung dendritic cells and airway epithelial cells in the induction, maintenance and resolution of virus induced immune responses and inflammation in the lung. A second focus of his work are studies to understand mechanisms of immune tolerance to allergens using models of peptide immunotherapy.

The current members of my group are:

Dr Paul Fitch  (Lab Manager)
Dr Aoife Kerrin (Postdoctoral Research Fellow)
Dr Amanda McFarlane (Postdoctoral Research Fellow)
Claire Leitch (MSc Student) Co-supervised with Prof Sarah Howie and Dr Richard Weller
Claire Wilson (NHS research assistant)
Dr Henry Mcsorley (Chancellors' Fellow)