Department of Physiological Sciences
View from Our Chair
Paul Davenport, Ph.D.
The Department of Physiological Sciences is one of the two basic science departments in the College of Veterinary Medicine. It is composed of 15 tenure track and 3 non-tenure track faculty members with expertise in the areas of anatomy, physiology, pharmacology, toxicology, neuroscience, and clinical pathology. Most faculty members teach veterinary students in the basic sciences during the first two years of the curriculum, but clinical pathology faculty members also teach clinical pathology to junior and senior veterinary students.
From the research perspective, most faculty members broadly participate in the areas of neuroscience/neurophysiology or toxicology/pharmacology. The department also has two faculty members working in the area of bone metabolism and a faculty member conducting research on rickettsial diseases. Research in the neuroscience/neurophysiology area includes studies of brain and spinal cord injury, neural control of respiration, cough, the cardiovascular system, and comparative neuroanatomy. Respiratory and cough research projects involve both human and animal studies and have extensive collaborations with other health science center colleges. Research in the area of toxicology/pharmacology includes basic toxicology, drug residues in meat-producing animals, drug metabolism in racing horses, aquatic toxicology, toxicologic risk assessment, and the emerging field of nanotoxicology. Extramural grants are obtained from many different agencies, but the majority of support comes by way of competitive grants from federal agencies including NIH, EPA, and NSF.
The department has oversight responsibility for the UF Center for Environmental and Human Toxicology (which includes the Analytical Toxicology Core Laboratory and the Aquatic Toxicology Laboratory) and the UF Racing Laboratory. In addition members of the department are active participants in Environmental Health Core of the MPH graduate program in the College of Public Health and Health Professions and the MS graduate program in Forensic Toxicology. Finally, the department is responsible for operation of the Clinical Pathology Laboratory in the Veterinary Medical Center. This laboratory provides assistance in the diagnosis of diseases of animals using hematology, clinical chemistry, exfoliative cytology, and urinalysis. Within this laboratory, we have three residents in training to become board-certified veterinary clinical pathologists.