Louis G. D’Alecy Professorship of Physiology

Louis G. D’Alecy, D.M.D., Ph.D., was born in 1941 on Staten Island, New York City, attended Seton Hall University, earned a D.M.D. in 1966 from New Jersey College of Medicine and Dentistry, and then earned a Ph.D. in 1971 in Physiology at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School. After a postdoctoral fellowship, he was appointed Assistant Professor in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics at the University of Washington School of Medicine. In 1973 he accepted a position as Assistant Professor of Physiology at the University of Michigan Medical School at the request of Professor Horace Davenport. In 1979-1980 he took a sabbatical as a Visiting Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard University. At Michigan, he rose through the ranks to Professor of Physiology in 1983. From 1985 through 2006 he also held a joint appointment in the Department of Surgery. He retired from his active faculty status on December 14, 2016, and is currently an Active Professor Emeritus of Physiology.

At Michigan, Professor D’Alecy has had diverse academic accomplishments in education, research, and service. In 1973, he began by offering a team-taught course in human physiology with Professor Matthew Kluger. By 1979 this course was enrolling over 300 students a year and drawing from the Dental school, Graduate Nursing and Pharmacy schools. He transitioned to teaching the undergraduate Honors Program and the Interflex Program and eventually to a growing role in directing and teaching in the Medical School sequences for cardiovascular and respiratory physiology. This last assignment spanned over 36 years from 1981 to his retirement in 2017. He received multiple teaching awards including the Kaiser Permanente Award for Excellence in Preclinical Teaching -- which he received several times -- and the Endowment for the Basic Sciences (EBS) teaching Award in Physiology. In 2014, he received the prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award in Medical Education.

Beyond the classroom Professor D’Alecy played a substantial teaching role in his research laboratory, which included 45 memberships in doctoral thesis committees and the mentoring of 11 postdoctoral trainees. He hosted 18 graduate research rotations, 13 undergraduate honors theses, and over 80 part

time undergraduate and medical student research internships all of which enriched and colored his formal classroom teaching and electrified his scientific work on an eclectic variety of collaborative basic science physiology investigations.

His doctoral dissertation, under Professor Eric O. Feigl, identified sympathetic and parasympathetic control of blood flow to the brain. At Michigan, the American Heart Association awarded him with Grants-in-Aid and then a fiveyear Established Investigatorship award. Funding from the National Institutes of Health and numerous pharmaceutical companies contributed to our understanding of the functioning and pathophysiology of the cardiovascular and respiratory systems. Early career collaborations with Professor Kluger identified the role of nasal versus tracheal airflow in the control of deep brain temperature in rabbits. Perhaps the most frequently cited paper with Professor Kluger was the seminal study in birds that established, for the first time, the existence, and evolutionary significance of the fever response which led to our current understanding of the widespread adaptive and protective value of fever in the body’s response to trauma and infection.

D’Alecy laboratory had, if not first authorships, major coauthorships, by one or more students ranging from high school students to undergraduates, to graduate students, to medical students, to postdoctoral fellows, and to professional research technicians that were routinely involved in all projects. They all were trained to record what they saw and not what they thought. Professor D’Alecy views his role in the research enterprise to be one of listening to the student, colleague, or collaborator and teasing out testable hypotheses from their innocent questions thus developing scientific explorations of the underlying physiological and or pathophysiological significance. Many of the projects addressed inadequate oxygen supply (hypoxia), or inadequate blood flow (ischemia), to tissues, organs, or the organism under study. Highlighting the student/faculty collaborative ethos and nature of work in the D’Alecy laboratory is Professor Jeffrey Kirsch who is here one of the major donors for the Louis G. D’Alecy Collegiate Professorship in Physiologytoday. As a freshman undergrad, Jeff Prof. Kirsch wondered if alterations in the type or amount of metabolic substrate available for energy production could increase survival time during hypoxia. A series of collaborative publications demonstrated that elevating blood ketones by virtually any means increased survival time in an individual exposed to hypoxia. By the time he graduated from medical school, Professor Kirsch had published seven first-authored papers. Professor D’Alecy reports that he is very proud to have participated in their training of Prof Kirsch and many other students in his laboratory.

Professor D’Alecy’s committee and administrative services to the University have been widely recognized. His roles in elected faculty governance included multiple terms on the Advisory Committee on Appointments, Promotions, and Tenure and two terms on the Medical School Executive Committee, and multiple terms on the Basic Science Academic Review Board for Medical Students. At the University level, he served as Chair of the Senate Advisory Committee on University Affairs and Chair of the Senate Assembly and Chair of the Faculty Senate. He was also motivated to take a pivotal role in the work of the “Joint Faculty-Administration Review Committee for the Faculty Grievance Process” resulting in a widely used roadmap for resolution of faculty grievances. For these extensive University services, Professor D’Alecy was awarded the Distinguished Faculty Governance Award in 2004.

Professor D’Alecy has been married to his wife Susan since 1964. Together they have three sons, Anthony, Stephen, and Louis, and five grandchildren, and all still live in the immediate Ann Arbor area.

Upon learning about the establishment of the collegiate professorship, Professor D’Alecy said: “I am greatly humbled that my friends and colleagues have honored my contributions to physiology and the University of Michigan with this endowed chair…”

The Louis G. D’Alecy Collegiate Professorship in Physiology will be awarded to a distinguished member of our faculty, or to recruit an exceptional individual to join our faculty. The collegiate professorship will provide annual discretionary research support that can be used for innovative, high-risk research projects.