TheDepartment of Physiology in Xiangya Medical School was founded in 1954 based on original Physiology group. In the long history of ‘Xiangya’ (over a hundred years), a large number of well-known physiologists in China have been working at Xiangya, such as Zhu Hengbi, Zhu Henian, Yi Jianlong, Zhou Yanjiao, Xu Youheng and Li Yunxia et al., who have made a great contribution to the development of medical physiology in China. The Department of Physiology in Xiangya Medical School maintains and further progresses an excellent teaching tradition with constant demanding of teaching reform and exploration to novel approach. Since 2003, "Physiology" has been ranked in the list of the first batch of National Excellent Courses, and in 2006, it was approved as the advanced subject in Hunan Province. In recent years, Physiology was consecutively awarded the National Quality Resource of Sharing Course (2014), the NationalOnlinePublicOpenCourse (2014), theNational Quality Resource of Sharing Course (online courses), and the National Quality Online Open Course (2018), the National Online and Offline Blended First-class Courses (2020), the National Curriculum Ideology and Morality Demonstration Course and Teaching Team (2021). The Department of Physiology in Xiangya Medical School has truly been playing the leading role in the medical physiology teaching in China.

As a discipline, Physiology in Xiangya Medical School began to cultivate post-graduate research students in the early 1950s, among the first approved batch of post-graduate training institutions for master and doctoral degrees. It was also first batch of authorized Department hosting post-doctoral mobile stations after the restoration of postgraduate enrollment in China. There are currently 6 full Professors, 9 Associate Professors, and 1 Lecturer working in the department (6 Professors are national qualified Doctoral supervisors and 11 other academics are qualified Master supervisors). There are also 45 post-graduate students at training in the department. This Department has been successfully attracted top level postdoctoral fellows for many years, with 9 postdoctoral fellows completed training. This discipline mainly conducts research on the pathogenesis of major chronic diseases. The research directions include: lung environment homeostasis and respiratory system diseases; molecular regulation of lung epithelial cell function and lung diseases; cellular and molecular mechanisms of lung injury protection; mechanism of thrombotic diseases; molecular bases of epsis; transplantation immune tolerance physiology; nerve cell protection in major neuronal diseases; cellular and molecular mechanisms of diabetes. Among them, lung physiology and diseases have distinctive characteristics. It is a leading research team of non-tumor lung disease research in China. With the Department of Physiology as the leader, in cooperation with the Department of Respiratory Medicine in Xiangya Hospital and Xiangya Second Hospital, the Department of Neonatology in Xiangya Hospital, a strong team covering the basic and clinical scientific research strengths has been established as the Hunan Provincial University Key Laboratory Platform—named "the Key Laboratory of Basic and Clinical Respiratory Diseases".In the past 8 years, the discipline of physiology in Xiangya Medical School has successfully completed over 17 national-level scientific research projects, and several major national R&D projects, with a total research funding of 8.07 million RMB. The publications from this Department are well over100SCI papers, manyin top rank international journals including "Immunity", "J Biol Chem", "The Journal of Immunology", " Cell Death Dis” and “FASEB J”.