William Schwab MD - Professor

Bill Schwab is a native of Madison and attended the University of Wisconsin as an undergraduate. He graduated from the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in 1980 and went on to complete his family practice residency at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. After residency, he worked as a family physician at the New River Family Health Center in the coal fields of southern West Virginia.

Bill joined the DFM faculty in 1985 and is a professor in the department as well as director of the Wisconsin Rural Physician Residency Assistance Program, a state-funded initiative to increase graduate medical education experiences in rural areas as a strategy to address the increasing shortage of physicians practicing in small communities. In past years, he has been associate director of the Madison Residency Program (1986-88), director of the Northeast Family Medical Center (1988-89 and 1992-1999), director of clinical operations for the DFM's Madison campus (2000-2002), director of the Madison Residency Program (2002-2008), and DFM vice-chair for education (2008-2010). He is a nationally respected clinician, educator and policy consultant about the care of children with special health care needs and adults with chronic illnesses and disabilities from a family-centered perspective. He is an officer on the Board of Directors of the Institute for Patient- and Family-Centered Care in Bethesda, Maryland and is a senior member of the Institute's teaching faculty. He was principle investigator for the National Medical Home Autism Initiative from 2004-2008, which was funded by the federal Maternal and Child Health Bureau, and is currently the PI of a grant from the Centers for Disease Control to enhance developmental screening by family physicians. Bill was honored as Family Physician of the Year by the Wisconsin Academy of Family Physicians in 1999 and received the Baldwin Lloyd Teaching Award from Madison Program residents in 1987 and 2008.