By Sarah Carey
After more than four decades of pioneering research in respiratory physiology, Paul Davenport, Ph.D., is retiring from the University of Florida College of Veterinary Medicine, where his work has helped countless patients — from asthmatic children to the late actor Christopher Reeve — better understand and manage their breathing.
“If you can’t breathe, nothing else matters,” said Davenport, a Distinguished Professor in the college’s Department of Physiological Sciences, succinctly summarizing the focus and meaning of his life’s work.
Davenport, who joined UF in July 1981 as an assistant professor, will officially retire on November 13 after a distinguished career that saw him become one of only two Distinguished Professors from the college. He also is the only college faculty member to have served on the UF Board of Trustees in his role as president of the faculty Senate.
“It was a great experience is that I was able in that role to get to know more about issues facing the entire university,” Davenport said.
Daryl Buss, D.V.M., Ph.D., led the department for 18 years before leaving Gainesville in 1994 to become dean at the University of Wisconsin’s College of Veterinary Medicine. He recruited Davenport to the UF faculty.
“At the time of his recruitment, Paul was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas-Galveston, so he was not deterred by the prospect of Gainesville summer heat and humidity. In fact, he enjoyed going for a run during the noontime heat,” Buss said, adding that once he encountered Davenport, red-faced, in the stairwell of the Basic Science Building returning from a run.
“I was amazed to have him exclaim, ‘It’s great out there … so much less humid than Galveston!’” Buss said. “Paul set the mark as the only faculty recruit who felt Florida humidity and heat were less severe than those to which they were accustomed!”
Davenport’s path to respiratory research began with teaching anatomy and respiratory physiology but evolved into groundbreaking studies on how the brain processes breathing information. This led him to collaborate with colleagues across disciplines and even travel to New York to work with the late “Superman” actor Christopher Reeve following his paralyzing spinal injury in 1995.
“We would go to his house,” Davenport said. “For three years, we did inspiratory muscle strength training with Christopher and got him so that he could breathe on his own off his ventilator for short periods of time.
“One of the big benefits is that patients know they’re not going to die if their ventilator stops,” he added. “Once you know you can breathe because your respiratory muscles are stronger, it makes you less fearful.”
Some of Davenport’s most impactful work came from unexpected places. When his son, a high school saxophone player, asked if he could play his instrument louder, Davenport developed a technique for expiratory muscle strength training.
“The way you play louder is you’re able to blow harder with more expiratory force,” Davenport said. “The question was, can you train the expiratory muscles?”
The resulting valve and training protocol initially tested on the Gainesville High School Band eventually led to treatments for patients with Parkinson’s disease and other conditions affecting swallowing function, helping prevent aspiration pneumonia.
His research also identified why some children with asthma face life-threatening situations; they literally don’t perceive they’re having breathing difficulty, preventing them from using their inhalers in time. This led to his discovery of the cerebral cortical “respiratory related potential” and furthered understanding of how the brain processes respiratory information.
Throughout his career, Davenport has embraced collaboration and the collaborative spirit of research. He worked with colleagues in pediatric pulmonology, speech pathology, physical therapy and neurology. He even coined the term “dystussia” with his colleague, Dr. Don Bolser, to describe disordered cough, a term now part of the medical lexicon.
“Dr. Davenport also described the sensory experience associated with coughing, which he termed ‘urge to cough’,” Bolser said. “His protocols for quantifying this sensation have been incorporated into a standard approach for investigating cough in human research and have led to well over 100 papers on the subject by other investigative teams.”
His CV lists numerous awards Davenport has amassed over the years, but his awards for teaching and the Teacher of the Year Award he received from the Class of 1990 in 1987 were among the most meaningful, he said.
“That’s what matters most,” he said.
Davenport’s affinity for mentorship extended beyond UF. For 20 years, he led a program taking high school youth and medical clinicians to Central America during spring break to run clinics, exposing young people to the health care needs of underserved populations.
Family has remained central to his professional life as well. Davenport’s favorite published manuscript lists his daughter, a physical medicine and rehabilitation physician, as first author, his son as second author and one of his Ph.D. students as third author.
As he approaches his last months at the college, Davenport said he feels good about the future and the faculty members who will come after him and carry not just his work, but the important research efforts of the entire college forward.
“There are wonderful young people that are taking this on and it’s their turn,” he said. “There are terrific people in our college and across the university and around the country, and they’ll do better than I did.”
After retirement, Davenport plans to continue collaborating with young faculty while spending more time fishing, making furniture and with his family — all while remaining a resource to the next generation of researchers carrying forward his legacy of understanding the fundamental act of breathing.
Dr. Paul Davenport Retirement Symposium
