( and injuries Minson said. Minson's...)Going To Extremes To Improve Human Health

Minson's work, which pertains to a range of disease conditions such as diabetes, involves uncovering the neural and vascular interactions in the skin during environmental heat stress. In the effort to understand why young women are more susceptible to fainting than men, he also studies how estrogen and progesterone influence blood pressure regulation.

Minson is the winner of a 2005 American Physiology Society's Outstanding Young Investigator Award (his second since 2000) and a similar national honor conferred in 2000 by the American College of Sports Medicine.

In addition to their well-established research programs, Halliwill and Minson share a strong commitment to training future researchers in environmental physiology. Currently, about 40 graduate students are enrolled in the Department of Human Physiology, which also has roughly 400 undergraduate majors. (The department, previously known as Exercise and Movement Science, underwent a name change in July 2004.)

"In this current day of rapid discovery in genetics and cellular biology, it is more important than ever that some attention be focused on the research-training of individuals who will make sense of the explosion of available information by connecting these discoveries to integrative physiological functions in the intact human being," Halliwill said.