Moving Along with Tim Musch

Moving Along with Tim Musch

The new APS president's 43-year career has seen many changes in science and academia. But he’s confident that physiology is the future.
By Meredith Sell

In 2014, Timothy Musch, PhD, FAPS, and his wife attended their daughter’s pinning ceremony before her graduation from physical therapy school. They were at Wichita State University, roughly 130 miles from their home in Manhattan, Kansas, known as the “Little Apple” and the domain of Kansas State University. Musch’s daughter introduced him to the head of Wichita State’s physical therapy program, and as they shook hands, Musch was caught off-guard by the man’s greeting.

“Dr. Musch, I took your Kinesiology 335 class,” the program head said. 

Musch didn’t recognize the man—after all, it’s not possible to remember every one of the thousands of students you’ve taught over 30 years—but he was proud to know that one of his previous students was leading a physical therapy program where not only his daughter, but other Kansas State graduates, continued their education.

Musch, who is a University Distinguished Professor of Exercise Physiology at Kansas State and teaches in both the College of Veterinary Medicine and the College of Health and Human Sciences, never imagined he would pursue a life in research or academia. When he started his undergraduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley in the 1970s, he was planning to go to dental school. “I had a girlfriend and her father was an orthodontist,” he says, “and I saw how they lived.”

He had a scholarship to Berkeley for swimming and was spending five hours a day in the athletic facilities. “Since I was spending so much time in the athletic department, I declared physical education,” he says. He took “Physiology of Exercise” with George Brooks, PhD, one of the assistant professors, and did exceptionally well. At the end of the course, Brooks asked Musch what he was going to do for his career and suggested he go to graduate school.

“Why would I go to graduate school?” Musch remembers asking, and Brooks’ answer was simple: “They pay you.” Musch was intrigued.

“Dr. Brooks, you couldn’t say ‘no’ to him,” Musch says. “He was this young guy. He knew my background and I knew his—kind of blue-collar backgrounds. He would never, ever call me by my first name. It was always, ‘Hey, Musch.’ ‘Yeah?’ ‘You’re gonna do this.’ ‘Okay.’”

Musch ended up earning his master’s at Berkeley and working in the lab with Brooks. When Musch was almost done with his master’s, Brooks told him he should pursue his doctorate. “Go to Madison, Wisconsin,” Brooks told him. “You’ll have more fun there.”

Finding His Way to Physiology

That’s exactly what Musch did. His time in Wisconsin ended up being pivotal: That’s where he met his wife, on a blind date set up by a fellow graduate student’s spouse. They married in 1980; he graduated in 1981. And then it was on to Dallas, to the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School, for his postdoctoral work. 

“I told my wife, if my postdoc wasn’t life-changing, then I was going to go to vet school,” he says, “but my time in Dallas was great.”

He worked with a cardiologist in the lab, looking at blood flow through muscle and how it was affected by cardiovascular stress. He learned the radiolabeled microsphere technique for measuring skeletal muscle blood flow and looked at skeletal blood flow in exercising dogs. His skill in that technique helped him land his next appointment: on the faculty at Pennsylvania State University in the Milton S. Hershey Medical Center.

He heard about the opportunity from a friend, who told him the job was practically written for him. Musch faxed his materials over on a Monday, heard back two days later, flew out the next Monday to interview, and received the job offer that Friday. He, his wife, and their newborn daughter packed up and moved to Hershey, Pennsylvania, where they stayed for nine years. Musch taught a little bit, ran the cardiovascular sheep laboratory for the first-year medical students, experimented on rats, and collaborated with colleagues on studies focused on heart transplant patients and heart failure.

“When I got into the business, if you talked with a cardiologist, they said the problem is the heart is damaged, it can’t pump, and so the people become very sedentary and what you see in the peripheral skeletal muscle is a detraining effect,” Musch says. But in work that he collaborated on with Lawrence Sinoway, MD, at Penn State, they found that the condition of heart failure changed how skeletal muscle blood flow was regulated at rest and during exercise and that it remained reduced in the patient even after they received a new heart.

In response to the heart’s inability to sustain a normal cardiac output, a strong vasoconstriction occurs in the skeletal muscle to maintain blood pressure. When the new heart was transplanted, that vasoconstriction didn’t just go away, so even though the new heart produced a greater cardiac output, it did not result in increases in skeletal muscle blood flow.

Findings like these excited Musch, and working closely with clinicians and drug companies meant he could see his work directly making a difference for patients. “It was a tremendous environment to get my career started,” he says. “I had all the resources I needed to be successful.”

But he says while he was appreciating the real-life impact of his work, the reductionist approach to science was taking hold, progressively narrowing down to the cellular and molecular level and too often neglecting systemic understandings of physiology. 

“The big move from the NIH was to go down into the cell. They thought the Human Genome Project would be how we would cure these diseases, so they started funding many cellular and molecular biologists. So, you have a lot of people going down, reduction in science, but they struggled to bring their discoveries back up to the organ systems level,” he says. “When I moved to Hershey, there was the Department of Physiology, then it became the Department of Cellular Physiology, then it became the Department of Cellular and Molecular Physiology.”

Then, for unrelated reasons, Penn State’s medical school hit financial trouble and Musch started seeking out other opportunities.

Recruiting His Kansas State Team

In the 1990s, universities across the U.S. were reorganizing their physical education programs into new kinesiology departments and looking for qualified faculty to teach science-based courses. Kansas State was one such institution. 

“When I interviewed, they were ready for me,” Musch says. “Every single time I had a question, they had the right answer. Where am I going to do my animal research? ‘You can have a lab in the vet school.’ Is the administration set up to administer my NIH grant? ‘Yes.’”

The university gave him a dual appointment with the Department of Kinesiology on the main campus and the Department of Anatomy and Physiology in the College of Veterinary Medicine. The dean encouraged him to recruit another physiologist. He started with David Poole, PhD, DSc, who was working in the medical school at University of California, San Diego, and whose research was complementary to Musch’s.

“We were both interested in the regulation of skeletal muscle blood flow,” Musch says. “I was at the macro level, so I looked at total flow to the muscle and muscle parts, and David did the microcirculation, so he was interested in oxygen transport and blood flow down in the capillaries.”

Next, they recruited Thomas Barstow, PhD, FAPS, whose research on oxygen uptake and skeletal muscle blood flow in humans complemented Musch and Poole’s animal research. Then, Richard McAllister, PhD, who could isolate arterioles and look at their function. “Each hire was instrumental in contributing to a team effort in the research program,” Musch says. They also strengthened the academic program, increasing the number of kinesiology majors from less than 200 to more than 600 today.

While other kinesiology programs focus on athletic training or biomechanics, Kansas State’s program has focused on the connection between physical activity and public health, and, appropriately, physiology.

“We have enough [faculty] in kinesiology that are physiologists, so we can offer the expertise in respiratory physiology, cardiovascular physiology, skeletal muscle physiology, neurophysiology,” Musch says. This background in systems physiology has set his graduates up for success. Feedback indicates that the students who come from the program know more physiology than the people who were teaching physiology in their physical therapy schools.

Calling More Attention to Physiology

This success, along with the example of peer institutions, led Musch’s colleagues to establish an integrative physiology major two years ago. It also backs up Musch’s conviction that physiology is the discipline crucial for ensuring discoveries made on the cellular and molecular levels are translated, tested and understood in the big picture. Musch plans to bring this same conviction to the role of APS president, which he stepped into in April. In this role, he will work to elevate the field of physiology and help APS fulfill its strategic plan.

“Physiology, historically, has been an extremely strong and important science associated with medicine, and it’s been lost a bit by the academic institutions. We need to re-establish that we are physiology, and we are important,” he says, chuckling. But it’s not just a joke. He means it. 

This article was originally published in the May 2024 issue of The Physiologist Magazine. Copyright © 2024 by the American Physiological Society. Send questions or comments to tphysmag@physiology.org.