Pharmacology and Nutritional Sciences professors receive tenure

The Department of Pharmacology and Nutritional Sciences is pleased to announce that Associate Professors Florin and Sanda Despa recently received tenure, and Dr. Kevin Pearson was promoted to the positon of associate professor with tenure. Before coming to the University of Kentucky in 2013, Florin and Sanda Despa had appointments at the University of California, Davis. Florin earned his Ph.D. from the Institute of Physics in Bucharest, Romania and did post-doctoral studies in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Chicago. He was an assistant professor of research at U.C. Medical School and a John von Neumann visiting scientist at the Juelich Research Center, Germany, previous to his appointment at U.C. Davis. Sanda Despa received her Ph.D. in Biomedical Sciences from Limburgs Universitair (now Hasselt) Diepenbeek, Belgium. She completed post-doctoral work with Dr. Donald Bers in the Department of Physiology at Layola University Medical Center in Chicago and was a research associate at Layola from 2005 to 2008. After leaving Layola she served as an assistant professor in the Department of Pharmacology at the University of California Davis until coming to the University of Kentucky in 2013. Kevin Pearson received his Ph.D. in Pathobiology and Molecular Medicine from the University of Cincinnati in the laboratory of Dr. W. Sean Davidson. Dr. Pearson continued his trained as a post-doctoral fellow under the tutelage of Dr. Rafael de Cabo in the Laboratory of Experimental Gerontology at the National Institute on Aging in Baltimore, MD. In March 2009 Dr. Pearson began his independent research career as an assistant professor in the Graduate Center for Nutritional Sciences at the University of Kentucky.