He was the first medical Dean in Australia who was not a medical doctor. His experience as Head and then President gave him an interest in administration which he followed by moving back to Perth to take up the position of Executive Dean in the School of Medicine and Dentistry at the University of Western Australia. In 1988, he was appointed Head of the University of Queensland Psychology Department and then elected by the academic staff of the university to be President of the Academic Board, a position to which he was re-elected for a second term. He served on the editorial boards of many scientific journals and was a fellow of many learned societies. He was elected the first President of Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society in Australia and was awarded the distinguished Career Scientist Award by the National Institutes of Health. He was a visiting Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford and he won the Brain Research Award of the British Red Cross Society. Schwartz is a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts, the Australian Institute of Company Directors, and the Australian Institute of Management. He was elected by his peers to the Academy of Social Sciences and he was elected Morris Leibovitz Fellow at the University of Southern California. Schwartz was named one of the 100 highest cited researchers in his field and he received many recognitions including a World Health Organization Fellowship, a NATO fellowship and the Australian Academy of Science-Royal Society (London) Exchange Fellowship. He published over 100 articles in scientific journals, and 13 books including Medical Judgement and Decision Making (with Timothy Griffin), Childhood Psychopathology (with James Johnson, two editions), Pavlov’s Heirs and a well-known textbook on abnormal psychology, Abnormal Psychology, A Developmental Approach. Over these years, Schwartz's research spanned clinical psychology, psychiatry, public health and medical decision making. He also served as visiting professor at Stanford University in 1983 and Harvard University in 1987. In 1980, he transferred to the University of Queensland first as Reader and then as Professor of Psychology.

In 1978 he moved to Australia to take up the position of Senior Lecturer in clinical psychology at the University of Western Australia in Perth. This led him to University of Texas Medical Branch where he was a full-time researcher in psychiatry. He began his academic career teaching at the Northern Illinois University.

He has also worked as a journalist, authoring many articles for research journals, magazines and newspapers. After leaving the City University of New York, he was commissioned an officer in the Public Health Service serving at the National Institute of Mental Health before completing a PhD degree at Syracuse University as a US Public Health Service Fellow. He was a National Merit Scholar finalist and he received a New York State Regent Scholarship. After attending public schools, he entered Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. Steven Schwartz was born in New York City in 1946. Throughout his career he was successful in establishing new schools and facilities at the universities he was involved with. He defended his record by saying that he wished universities to be more market-oriented, research-focused, accountable, transparent and held to higher standards, in the hope of improving university profiles and attracting more students, funding and researchers. His style of management was controversial and attracted considerable opposition. He is a trained psychologist and served both as senior academic and researcher, then as a university corporate manager. He was previously Vice Chancellor of Brunel University in the UK and of Murdoch University in Western Australia. Steven Schwartz AM ( / ʃ w ɔːr t s/ born 5 November 1946) is an American and Australian academic and, until late 2012, the Vice Chancellor of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. For other people named Stephen Schwartz, see Stephen Schwartz (disambiguation).

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