By UBNow Staff

The Chancellor’s Awards acknowledge and provide system-wide recognition for consistently superior professional achievement and the ongoing pursuit of excellence in six categories: Faculty Service, Librarianship, Professional Service, Scholarship and Creative Activities, Teaching, and Adjunct Teaching.

A professor of microbiology and immunology, Panepinto received a Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities, which recognizes the work of those who engage actively in scholarly and creative pursuits beyond their teaching responsibilities.

Panepinto conducts pioneering work that has redefined the understanding of how fungal pathogens adapt to host environments. His research focuses on how certain fungi have evolved mechanisms to thrive at mammalian core body temperature while most cannot, a question with profound implications regarding the future threat of fungal diseases in a warming world.

His work has not only advanced the understanding of fungal virulence but also has identified new therapeutic targets for antifungal drug development, an area of urgent global need given the increasing prevalence of fungal infections in immunocompromised populations.

With continuous National Institutes of Health funding for more than 17 years, and more than 50 publications in leading journals, his work has uncovered new paradigms of gene regulation in fungal pathogens. His group’s findings, which defined a new molecular basis for fungal thermotolerance, have become foundational references for understanding post-transcriptional gene regulation in eukaryotic pathogens.

As senior associate dean for biomedical education, he led the creation of infrastructure to support innovation and scholarship in the biomedical sciences undergraduate, master’s and PhD programs, which has increased enrollment and programmatic expansion.   

In the graduate education space, he served on the steering committee for the AAMC Group on Research Education and Training and was recently appointed to the steering committee of the AAMC Biomedical Research Advancement, Training, and Oversight Group as member-at-large, and inaugural chair-liaison to the Research Education and Training Standing Committee.

The work of this group emphasizes advancing research excellence, promoting education and career development for biomedical research trainees across the continuum of training, as well as federal research funding and oversight and conflicts-of-interest in academic medicine.

He was recognized with the 2024 UB Award for Excellence in Graduate Student Mentoring and the Faculty Award for Excellence in Promoting Inclusion and Cultural Diversity.

A colleague calls Panepinto, “that rare individual who can simultaneously function extraordinarily effectively in the research, administration and teaching/mentoring arenas.”