Dr. Edward L. Barnes is an Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Division of Gastroenterology & Hepatology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He attended the University of South Carolina Honors College and the University of South Carolina School of Medicine. He then came to the University of North Carolina to complete his residency in internal medicine, where he also served as a chief resident. He completed a gastroenterology fellowship at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, MA, where he also obtained a Master of Public Health from the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health. Following the completion of his general gastroenterology fellowship, Dr. Barnes returned to the University of North Carolina to complete an Advanced Fellowship in Inflammatory Bowel Disease.

Dr. Barnes is a gastroenterologist and clinical investigator dedicated to improving the care of patients with inflammatory bowel disease. He has a particular interest in improving outcomes for patients with ulcerative colitis who require a colectomy and an ileal pouch-anal anastomosis. Given the high burden of disease that patients with an ileal pouch-anal anastomosis may experience, including the development of new inflammatory conditions of the pouch, Dr. Barnes has developed multiple new research strategies to identify risk profiles for those patients at greatest risk for adverse outcomes and strategies to improve the effectiveness of available therapies for pouch-related disorders. He has received funding from the National Institutes of Health/National Institutes of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, the Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation, and the American College of Gastroenterology to support these efforts. Dr. Barnes has led the development of a prospective, multicenter registry, recruiting patients from eight centers across the United States to better understand the drivers of disease and response to therapy in patients with inflammatory conditions of the pouch. He is committed to developing new methods to better understand the epidemiology of pouchitis and other pouch-related disorders on larger scales.

Dr. Barnes serves as the Chair of the Rising Educators Academics and Clinicians Helping IBD (REACH-IBD) committee of the Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation and is an Associate Editor for Inflammatory Bowel Diseases. Dr. Barnes serves as the Associate Program Director for the Gastroenterology & Hepatology Fellowship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and he was honored with the 2020 UNC Gastroenterology Fellows Award for Excellence in Mentoring. He also received the Uniting to Care and Cure Award from the Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation in 2021.

In 2021, Dr. Barnes received the Sherman Emerging Leader Prize for Excellence in Crohn’s and Colitis.