Timothy L. Denning
Vice President for Research and Economic Development
Georgia State University
[email protected]
Jessica Shepherd
Administrative Coordinator for the Vice President for Research and Economic Development
Georgia State University
[email protected]
tel: (404) 413-3517
Vice President for Research and Economic Development
Timothy L. Denning
Dr. Timothy L. Denning is vice president for research and economic development at Georgia State University and a Distinguished University Professor in the university’s Institute for Biomedical Sciences (IBMS), where he was previously associate director and director of academic programs.
Before joining Georgia State, he was an assistant professor in the Department of Pediatrics and the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at Emory University. Dr. Denning was awarded the Distinguished Alumnus Award in 2020 from the University of Texas Medical Branch’s Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences.
Dr. Denning’s research focuses on the role of intestinal immune cells in the regulation of experimental models of Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, and has been supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH)’s National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases and the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation. His research has shown that exposure to microorganisms such as bacteria early in life plays a crucial role in inhibiting the development of colon cancer in adulthood. It has shown that specific immune cells have the ability to produce a healing factor that can promote wound repair in the intestine and that small proteins called cytokines can control whether immune cells promote or suppress inflammatory bowel disease.
Dr. Denning is a grant reviewer for several funding agencies, including the NIH. He has published more than 60 peer-reviewed studies and has served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Immunology, Gastroenterology andInflammatory Bowel Diseases. He is a member of the American Association of Immunologists, the American Society for Investigative Pathology and the Society for Mucosal Immunology.
Dr. Denning has been chair of Georgia State’s Institutional Biosafety Committee and vice-chair of the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee. As director of academic programs at IBMS, he led the development of a new Ph.D. program in Translational Biomedical Sciences, a Master of Interdisciplinary Studies with a concentration in Biomedical Enterprise and a Bachelor of Interdisciplinary Studies with a concentration in Biomedical Science and Enterprise.
Born in El Paso, Texas, Dr. Denning received his bachelor’s degree from Texas A&M University in College Station. He earned a Ph.D. in microbiology and immunology at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, and did postdoctoral training at the La Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology in La Jolla, Calif., and the Emory Vaccine Center.