Dr. Barry Ache Receives Professor Emeritus Status

Dr. Barry Ache Receives Professor Emeritus Status

Published: Monday, April 20, 2020

Whitney Laboratory and Center for Smell and Taste Distinguished Professor of Biology and Neuroscience, Dr. Barry Ache, has been granted emeritus status in recognition of meritorious service by the University of Florida.

Dr. Barry Ache was active in chemical senses research since he first assumed a faculty position at the University of Florida in 1978. For most of that time, his work was continuously funded by the National Institutes of Health (National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders) and the National Science Foundation. He focused on understanding the cellular basis of odor coding in the olfactory periphery. His laboratory used primarily electrophysiological, but also molecular, biochemical and imaging approaches on crustacean, insect and mammalian animal models to understand how natural, complex odor mixtures are encoded by the olfactory system.

From 1998-2015, Ache was the Founding Director for the University of Florida Center for Smell and Taste and became a Distinguished Professor of Biology and Neuroscience in 1999.

A symposium inspired by the scientific legacy of Ache, The Neurophysiological Basis of Olfactory Coding, is currently being rescheduled to later in 2020 at the Whitney Laboratory.

Barry W. Ache, Ph.D.

Current Director for the Center Smell and Taste, Dr. Steven Munger, earned a Ph.D. in neuroscience from the University of Florida, where he conducted his thesis research under Dr. Barry Ache at the Whitney Laboratory. Munger was recently interviewed for the article, What you need to know about the possible taste/smell link to COVID-19.