Leszek Z. Kubin, a former research professor of animal biology in the department of biomedical sciences in Penn Vet, died on May 26. He was 70.

Dr. Kubin received an MS in biomedical engineering from Warsaw Polytechnic in Poland in 1976. He then went on to receive two PhDs in 1983, one in physiology from the Warsaw School of Medicine and one in neurophysiology from Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy. In 1983, he joined Penn Vet’s faculty as a research associate in animal biology, a position he held on and off throughout the 1980s. In 1988, he became a research assistant professor in animal biology, and six years later, he was promoted to research professor, specializing in pulmonary and vascular sciences.

While at Penn, Dr. Kubin conducted research on respiratory, sleep and metabolic disorders associated with the obstructive sleep apnea syndrome, as well as homeostatic regulation of sleep. He received several University Research Foundation (URF) awards to use rodent models to understand the pharmacological mechanisms of REM sleep and the accompanying suppression of motoneuronal activity, and to identify the cellular basis of the response to sleep deprivation. This research was published widely, and in 2015, Dr. Kubin was awarded a $1,000,000 grant from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health to support his project, “Premotor Control of Upper Airway and REM Sleep Atonia.” He retired from Penn in 2019.