Wolfram Goessling, MD, PhD

Wolfram Goessling, MD, PhD, is the chair of the Department of Internal Medicine at Yale School of Medicine, chief of Internal Medicine at Yale New Haven Hospital, and physician-in-chief for Medicine across the Yale New Haven Health System, as of September 1, 2025.

In his laboratory, Dr. Goessling identifies regulators of liver growth and differentiation during development, organ regeneration, and cancer formation. He pioneered the use of zebrafish models for studying liver disease and, with his colleagues, was among the first to use chemical genetic screening methodologies to identify molecules for use in clinical trials. Collaborating with the Framingham Heart Study, Dr. Goessling’s group was also among the first to validate genes identified in genome-wide association studies for liver and kidney disorders functionally in in vivo models.

Dr. Goessling is a Pew Biomedical Scholar and has received many prestigious awards, including the William Randolph Hearst Young Investigator in Medicine Award at Brigham and Women’s Hospital; the Dr. Irving M. London Teaching Award at Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology; the Donald O’Hara, PhD, Faculty Prize for Excellence in Teaching at Harvard-MIT; the MGH100 Award; and the Tiedemann Courage in Cancer Award from the Hope Funds for Cancer Research. He is an elected member of the American Society of Clinical Investigation and the Interurban Clinical Club and a fellow of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases and the American Gastroenterological Association. In addition, Dr. Goessling has served as an associate editor for Hepatology, the official journal of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases.

Prior to joining Yale, Dr. Goessling was chief of Gastroenterology and the Jules L. Dienstag, MD, and Betty and Newell Hale Endowed Chair in Gastroenterology at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in Boston. He also served as the Robert H. Ebert Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School (HMS) and the HMS director of the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology.

Dr. Goessling earned a medical degree and PhD (summa cum laude) from the University of Witten/Herdecke Medical School in Witten, Germany, and received an honorary Master of Arts degree from Harvard University. He pursued his residency training in internal medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, where he also served as chief medical resident. He completed fellowships in medical oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute/Partners combined fellowship and in gastroenterology at MGH.