Paul Josiah Schwab, MD Scholarship
Dr. Paul Schwab ’53 was a longtime Naperville psychiatrist and former professor of psychiatry at the Pritzker School of Medicine at the University of Chicago. Born in Waxahachie, Texas, Dr. Schwab spent most of his childhood in the San Antonio area, where both his parents were college professors. He received a bachelor’s degree from North Central College in 1953, and on the evening of his graduation married his wife of 51 years, Martha, who also was a North Central College student.
In 1957, Dr. Schwab graduated with honors from Baylor Medical School in Texas. He then was an intern at Philadelphia General Hospital before a two-year Public Health Service commitment at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. While working at the National Institute of Health, Dr. Schwab helped develop a technique that remains a standard treatment for a rare blood disorder known as Waldenstrom’s macroglobulinemia. He later completed residencies in internal medicine and psychiatry at the University of Chicago. Earlier in his career, Dr. Schwab practiced psychiatry at his Chicago office. In 1980 he moved his practice to Naperville, where he had lived with his family since 1965.
The author of fifteen journal articles, Dr. Schwab held numerous professional memberships and was an examiner and diplomat of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology. For more than three decades, he taught in the department of psychiatry at the University of Chicago’s medical school. He received the Nancy C. A. Roeske, M.D., Certificate of Excellence from the American Psychiatric Association in 1991 and Outstanding Teacher Awards from the department of psychiatry of the University of Chicago in 1991 and 2003.
Since 1980, Dr. Schwab was on the Board of Trustees at North Central College. He received the Outstanding Alumnus Award in 1983 and the Gael D. Swing Award for Meritorious Service in 2001. The College also named its psychology research laboratory the Dr. Paul J. Schwab Psychology Research Center.
In addition, for more than 40 years, Dr. Schwab was an active member of the Community United Methodist Church in Naperville, where he founded the church’s Sojourners Sunday School class, which he taught for many years.
The Paul J. Schwab, M.D. Scholarship Fund is designed to honor excellence by providing scholarship aid to a student each year who is entering his/her fourth year at North Central College whose goal is to continue his or her education in medicine upon graduation. The scholarship consists of $1,000 to be used toward tuition and book expenses along with a $500 stipend to be used toward for applying to medical schools (i.e. admission tests including the MCAT), application fees and transcript requests.