We welcome your visit to our website, and we hope that the academic, research, and professional excellence in the Department of Physiology are what you are seeking.
We take pride in having a long tradition as an outstanding workplace at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center in Memphis. Our department has a current annual budget of 12.9 million dollars grant funding and has consistently been rated in the top 15 departments of physiology at public medical schools based on such funding.
Our faculty provide distinguished service on many editorial boards (American Journal of Physiology, Biochimica et Biophysica Acta, Journal of Biological Chemistry, etc.), NIH Study Sections, and organizing committees of prestigious national and international meetings (Experimental Biology, FASEB Summer Conferences, International Conference on Eicosanoids and Lipid Mediators). Among our faculty, Profs. Leonard Share and Lester Van Middlesworth are University Distinguished Professors, and Prof. Clark Blatteis has recently been recognized by the Living History Project of the American Physiological Sciences. Our faculty also include the Vice Chancellor for Research, the Vice Chancellor for Faculty and Academic Affairs, the Dean of the Graduate College, and the Associate Dean of the Graduate College. In addition, we have three endowed professorships: the Harriet S. Van Vleet Chair (Prof. Gabor Tigyi), the Thomas A. Gerwin Professorship (Prof. Leonard R. Johnson), and the Maury R. Bronstein Professorship (Prof. Aviv Hassid).
The Department of Physiology is recognized internally as well as externally. For many years, students have ranked our medical physiology course either at the top or in second place, and they have honored our faculty with the Golden Apple Awards for teaching. We take pride in training our graduate students in courses of study offered through the Integrated Graduate Program in Biomedical Sciences. These tracks include Molecular, Cellular and Systems Physiology, Cancer and Developmental Biology, Cell Biology and Biochemistry, Genetics, Functional Genomics, and Proteomics, Neuroscience, and in Molecular Therapeutics and Cell Signaling. Over a dozen graduate students are currently being provided this excellent training in our department.
Our postdoctoral fellows publish in top-tier journals and successfully move on to take faculty positions or careers in government or private sectors, including Fortune 500 companies such as Pfizer, Serono Inc., and Merck & Co. Recent graduates have taken postdoctoral positions in top research institutions, including Yale, Scripps Research Institute, and Harvard.
The Department of Physiology currently has close to one hundred employees including faculty, staff, and students and is now expanding our space in the Nash Research Building so that we can increase this number. We are adding four new faculty positions and will be replacing several colleagues upon their retirement in the next few years. Two incoming faculty will be hired in 2008, and state-of-the-art laboratories will be provided for their new research homes. We are also in the planning stages for the remainder of the Nash Research Building renovation, which has been identified as a priority by the University of Tennessee for the 2008-2009 fiscal year.
We have recently expanded our shared equipment park with a Zeiss 5 LIVE confocal microscope, which complements the Zeiss 510 PASCAL microscope that we have had for a few years. We are also adding a new Perkin Elmer Micro Beta counter to the list of available equipment in January 2008.
We cordially invite you to visit the other pages of our website and make yourself familiar with our Department of Physiology. We also hope that you will visit us again, not just through the web but in person.
Gabor Tigyi, M.D., Ph.D.
Harriet Van Vleet Professor and Chair
Department of Physiology
the Chair