Drs. Bulitta and Zhou honored at UF Health Celebration of Distinction event

Celebrating Distinction
Daohong Zhou, M.D., Dean Julie Johnson, Pharm.D., and Jürgen Bulitta, Ph.D., at the UF Health Celebrating Distinction event.

UF Health recognized 22 new endowed professors in the academic colleges, including two University of Florida College of Pharmacy faculty, at a Celebration of Distinction event on Oct. 22. Jürgen Bulitta, Ph.D., an associate professor of pharmacotherapy and translational research, was installed as the Perry A. Foote Eminent Scholar Chair, and Daohong Zhou, M.D., a professor of pharmacodynamics and radiation oncology, was installed as the Henry E. Innes Professor of Cancer Research. Appointment to an endowed professorship is one of the highest honors a college can bestow on a faculty member and is reserved for scholars of national and international acclaim.

Bulitta joined UF in 2015 as a preeminence faculty hire in the drug discovery and development program. His research lab is located at the UF Research and Academic Center in Orlando, where he has established an internationally-recognized program in translational antimicrobial pharmacology. Bulitta’s research focuses on multidrug-resistant bacterial “superbugs,” which the World Health Organization identified as one of the most serious threats to human health.

Zhou joined UF in 2018 and has earned more than $19 million in research funding during his career and published more than 120 peer-reviewed scientific articles and book chapters. His discoveries have led to better understanding of the role of cellular senescence in ionizing radiation- and chemotherapy-induced tissue damage and a first safe BCL-XL targeting agent that has the potential to be developed as a novel anti-cancer and anti-aging therapeutics, among other findings.