Schonfeld, Gustav, Vertical File

Gustav Schonfeld was born in 1934 in Munkacs, Hungary ( which is now Mukachevo, Ukraine). In 1944 during World War II, Schonfeld and his family were taken from their home to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. His brother and grandmother died there, and he was separated from his mother until the end of the war. Schonfeld and his father spent over a year transferring between concentration camps at Auschwitz, Warsaw, Dachau,and Muhldorf. During this time, Schonfeld assisted his father, a physician, who was put to work treating sick prisoners at each of the camps.

After the war, Schonfeld and his parents immigrated to the St. Louis area in 1946. Although he did not know English when he arrived in the U.S., he quickly learned while attending public school in East St. Louis. Schonfeld attended Washington University, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1956,and a medical degree in 1960. After residency in Internal Medicine at New York University, he returned to Washington University in 1963 as chief resident at Jewish Hospital. He subsequently served as a fellow in endocrinology and metabolism at Barnes Hospital. He spent two years as a research flight medical officer with the U.S. Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine and two years at MIT as associate professor of nutrition. He then returned to St. Louis and joined the School of Medicine faculty in 1972 as associate professor of Preventive Medicine and of Internal Medicine and director of the Lipid Research division, becoming a full professor in 1977.

Schonfeld served as acting chair of the Department of Preventive Medicine for three years before he was named the Kountz Professor of Medicine in 1987. From 1996 to 1999, he served as Adolphus Busch Professor, chair of the Department of Internal Medicine, and physician-in-chief at Barnes-Jewish Hospital, before returning full-time to his research on lipid metabolism. He became the Samuel E. Schechter Professor of Medicine in 2001. He was a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation and the Association of American Physicians. In 1995, he received an Alumni/Faculty Award from the Washington University Medical Center Alumni Association.