Benjamin L. Shneider, MD

Dr. Shneider's leadership goal is to leverage the wide-ranging clinical and research expertise of an exceptionally talented section to provide compassionate, state-of-the-art, discipline-leading and evidence-based care for children with all types of gastrointestinal, hepatic, pancreatic and nutritional disorders. Rapidly-paced advances in biomedical knowledge provide an unprecedented opportunity to simultaneously advance both clinical care and the science of medicine. As Chief of Pediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition at Texas Children's Hospital and the Baylor College of Medicine, Dr. Shneider will encourage and lead expanding activities in both education and research in order to optimally capitalize on these rapidly paced biomedical advances with the ultimate goal of providing outstanding care for the patients and their families who entrust their care to the section.

Dr. Shneider’s research career began during his undergraduate studies at Stanford University. His interest in Pediatric Hepatology was sparked by experiences during medical school at The University of Chicago. He completed a residency in Pediatrics at The Children's Hospital, Boston with subsequent fellowship training in Pediatric Gastroenterology/Hepatology at the Yale University School of Medicine. He served as the Director of Pediatric Hepatology at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine for nine years and at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine for seven years, until his recruitment to Texas Children's Hospital and the Baylor College of Medicine in 2015 as Section Chief and Head of Pediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition.

Dr. Shneider is a physician-scientist with varied areas of expertise including a clinical focus in cholestatic liver diseases and portal hypertension, basic and translational investigations of bile acid homeostasis, and basic research on mechanisms of intestinal carcinogenesis. Dr. Shneider’s primary research focus is on clinical investigations of pediatric liver diseases. Recent work has been conducted in the context of the Childhood Liver Disease Research Network (ChiLDReN), an NIDDK-funded multi-center effort. Dr. Shneider has led a number of studies conducted within ChiLDReN advancing understanding of the natural history of biliary atresia. He has led a major multi-centered randomized placebo-controlled trial of a novel intestinal bile acid transport inhibitor in the treatment of pruritus in the Alagille syndrome, a disease manifest by profound cholestasis. Dr. Shneider is leading a large-scale multi-center prospective study of the utility of the transient elastographic measurement of liver stiffness in pediatric cholestatic liver disease. Dr. Shneider’s expertise as a physician-scientist has been leveraged in his current mentorship of three faculty in the section addressing novel approaches to newborn screening for biliary atresia, analysis of the fecal microbiome in the clinical course of infants with biliary atresia and assessment of novel markers of immunodeficiency in children with chronic liver disease. Dr. Shneider has consistently pursued advances in evidence-based approaches to the diagnosis and treatment of pediatric liver disorders with particular interest in issues related to chronic cholestasis, cirrhosis and portal hypertension.