Jan Petrasek, M.D., Ph.D.

Dr. Jan Petrasek earned MD and Ph.D. degrees from Charles University in Prague. In 2008, he relocated to the University of Massachusetts Medical School for post-doctoral training in liver immunology. He joined the laboratory of Dr. Gyongyi Szabo, a world leader in alcoholic liver disease, to study the mechanisms of liver inflammation and fatty liver disease. His research defined several novel therapeutic targets in alcoholic liver disease and established the scientific foundation for a multicenter clinical trial investigating the role of interleukin-1 blockade in treating patients with severe alcoholic hepatitis.

After completing his post-doctoral fellowship, Dr. Petrasek moved to the UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, where he completed his internal medicine residency, gastroenterology fellowship, and transplant hepatology fellowship and worked on delineating mechanisms of fatty liver disease in the laboratory of Dr. Beth Levine, a leading investigator in the field of autophagy. In 2021, Dr. Petrasek joined the University of Mississippi Medical Center faculty as an Assistant Professor and Associate Program Director for the Gastroenterology Fellowship Program. In 2023, he joined the faculty of the Texas Liver Institute and UT Health San Antonio.

Dr. Petrasek has authored >45 peer-reviewed manuscripts, review papers, and book chapters. An Alpha Omega Alpha inductee and recipient of numerous scholarly awards, he is an active member of the American Society of Transplantation (AST), the American Association for the Study of Liver Disease (AASLD), and the American Gastroenterology Association (AGA), among many other national and international organizations. He serves as an editorial board member for Hepatology Communications and an ad hoc reviewer for multiple national and internationally known journals.