John W. Phillis, Ph.D. professor emeritus and former chair of the Wayne State University School of Medicine’s Department of Physiology, died April 8. He was 81.

Dr. Phillis served as chair of Physiology from 1981 to 1997.

Born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, West Indies, in 1936, he studied veterinary science at Sydney University in Australia, graduating with honors in 1958. He received his doctoral degree in Neuroscience from the Australian National University in 1960. In 1961, Dr. Phillis was appointed a Wellcome Research Fellow at the Agricultural Research Council Institute of Animal Physiology in Cambridge, England. He returned to Australia in 1963 as a lecturer in Physiology at Monash University in Melbourne. He later moved to Canada, where he held positions in the Department of Physiology at the University of Manitoba, and subsequently the headship of the Department of Physiology at the University of Saskatchewan. In 1981, he became chair of the Department of Physiology at Wayne State University.

The potent inhibitory actions of adenosine on central neurons was first discovered in Dr. Phillis’ laboratory in 1974. He also published the first paper recognizing that caffeine and theophylline exerted their neurostimulant effects by blocking the central actions of adenosine. He published a monograph, “The Pharmacology of Synapses,” and edited or co-edited five books, together with numerous book chapters and more than 400 research papers, three of which have been identified as Citation Classics or Landmarks. He was a founding editor of Progress in Neurobiology and served as editor of the Canadian Journal of Physiology and Pharmacology from 1978 through 1981.

Dr. Phillis stepped down as chair in 1997 and went into full retirement in 2003. In 2004, he received the School of Medicine’s Lawrence M. Weiner Award in recognition of his outstanding contributions to the school through “…exceptional performance of teaching, research and/or administrative duties.”