UF physiologist assumes new administrative role, steps down from department chairmanship

University of Florida researcher Ian Phillips, Ph.D., D.Sc., has stepped down as chairman of the College of Medicine’s department of physiology and functional genomics, a position he held for 21 years.

On July 1,2001 Phillips assumed a new role at the university, associate vice president of research and graduate education. He will continue to run his National Institutes of Health-funded research program, which focuses on neuroscience and gene therapy for cardiovascular disease.

Charles Wood, Ph.D., a professor of physiology, will serve as the department’s interim chairman. Wood researches the endocrine and cardiovascular development of the fetus, fetal response to stress and the timing of birth.

While chairman, Phillips elevated the department to one of the nation’s top 10 physiology departments in research dollars awarded per faculty member. He had recently renamed the department, which has 12 primary and 28 joint and affiliated faculty members, adding “functional genomics” to reflect its new research direction aimed at identifying the specific roles of individual genes. He is director and co-founder of the UF Hypertension Center and director of the NIH-supported minority student summer research grant.

Phillips has served as the program director of neurobiology at the National Science Foundation, chairman of a National Institutes of Health study section and president of the Association of Chairs of Departments of Physiology. He has been editor-in-chief of the international journal Regulatory Peptides since 1990. He has published 300 papers and edited 10 books.

He earned a Ph.D. in 1967 and a D.Sc. in 1986 at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. He completed additional training at the University of Michigan and the California Institute of Technology.

Phillips has received numerous honors for teaching and research, including Teacher of the Year awards at the University of Iowa, the Humboldt Scholar Award for studies at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, the Lucian Award in Cardiovascular Disease from McGill University, Canada, and a MERIT Award from NIH, which provides funding until 2005. At UF he has received the Professorial of Excellence Performance Award, the UF Research Foundation Award and the College of Medicine Faculty Prize for Basic Science Research.