Paul Wischmeyer MD

Paul Edmund Wischmeyer, MD, EDIC, FASPEN, FCCM, is a nutrition, exercise, critical care, and perioperative physician-researcher who specializes in enhancing preparation and recovery from surgery, critical care, and COVID-19. He serves as a Tenured Professor of Anesthesiology and Surgery at Duke. He also serves as the Director of the Duke Clinical Nutrition Fellowship, Director of the TPN/Nutrition Team at Duke, and Director of the DUKE STRONGER Prehab/Rehab Service- Surgical and ICU Therapy for Rehabilitation, Optimization, Nutrition, Growth (Muscle), Endurance, and Recovery (STRONGER) Service/Clinic. The Duke STRONGER service and clinic is a unique multi-disciplinary initiative focused on helping surgical, organ transplant, cancer, and ICU patients regain strength, muscle, endurance, nutrition status, and cognition via the use of personalized nutrition, exercise, and anabolic agent/nutrient interventions— before, during, and after their hospital journey. Its focus is on how we help our patients not just survive, but recover stronger.

Dr. Wischmeyer earned his medical degree with honors at The University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine, where he was elected into the honor society of Alpha Omega Alpha for outstanding academic achievement. He completed his pediatric internship at the University of Colorado Children’s Hospital and his anesthesiology/critical care residency training at the University of Chicago. He also completed a Clinical Pharmacology fellowship and the NIH K30 Clinical Research Scientist Training Program while at the University of Chicago.

Dr. Wischmeyer’s clinical and research focus is on helping patients prepare for and recover from critical illness, injury, and surgery. His research interests include personalized surgical and ICU nutrition and exercise rehabilitation therapy, oral, enteral, and parenteral nutrition and personalized nutrition-intervention trials, perioperative optimization, post-illness muscle mass and functional recovery, and the role of probiotics/microbiome in illness. Dr. Wischmeyer’s research group has been awarded multiple NIH, DOD, and other peer-reviewed grants to perform research ranging from basic mechanistic cell work to large-scale multi-center clinical trials in the fields of critical care, perioperative medicine, nutrition, illness metabolism, microbiome/probiotics, and exercise interventions to improve functional outcomes.