Dr. Mark Silverberg completed his internal medicine and gastroenterology training at the University of Toronto in 1997. He then completed a PhD studying the genetics of inflammatory bowel disease in 2002 at the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute of Mount Sinai Hospital. He is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Medicine. Dr. Silverberg, clinician scientist and the Gale and Graham Wright Research Chair in Digestive Diseases, is based at Mount Sinai Hospital and the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute investigating genetic aspects of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).
 

His research program is funded by grants from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK/NIH), CIHR, the Crohn's and Colitis Foundation of Canada (CCFC) and the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation of America (CCFA). His laboratory is focused on identifying novel susceptibility genes for IBD and to explain the contribution of genes and other biomarkers to its etiology and clinical course. 

More recently he has expanded his program to study the relationship between serum immune responses, gene regulation and the host microbiome and genetic susceptibility. He has made significant contributions to the discovery of genes related to Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis and paediatric IBD. 

He also has made major contributions to the field of phenomics and classification of IBD (The Montreal Classification).
 

Dr. Silverberg has taken leadership positions on several international collaborative efforts with the goal of expediting scientific progress in the field of IBD. These include the International IBD Genetics Consortium, the NIDDK IBD Genetics Consortium and the CCFA Microbiome Initiative. Dr. Silverberg is also the Director of the Advanced IBD Fellowship Program at MSH and co-director of the Canadian GI Fellows Program in IBD. 

His current projects are directed toward identifying key genes underlying risk for the most aggressive forms of Crohn’s disease and to understand the relationship between the microbiome in the digestive tract and host genotype. Ultimately he hopes to develop tools that will allow clinicians to better predict who may develop IBD and to identify high-risk patients so that a more personalized approach to treatment based on patients’ unique genetic signatures may be employed.